Harvesting the Hedges 
friend’s recipe for Rose-jelly! “Take off the tops of the 
hips, cut them into pieces, which put in a preserving- 
pan with just enough water to cover them. Keep boiling 
and bruising until a soft pulp. Squeeze through a cheese- 
cloth, then pass through a jelly-bag ; i lb. sugar to every 
2 gills of juice ; boil 20 to 30 minutes.” I have heard that 
in France there is a mixture called Conserve de Cynon - 
hodons, made by mixing Dog-rose hips deprived of their 
seeds with icing sugar, 1 part hips to 2 parts sugar. They 
are beaten to a pulp, rubbed through a sieve, and then 
thoroughly mixed with the sugar. I think in America a 
little honey is added as well. It is a good cure for 
Aphtha. 
The abundance of hips and haws is said to presage a 
hard winter — “ Mony haws, mony snaws ” ; and another 
sign is when the Onions have their coats thin : 
Onion skin very thin, 
Mild winter coming in ; 
Onion skin thick and rough, 
Coming winter cold and rough. 
Certainly this year their skins are few and thin. There is 
a saying on the Border that Onions keep off the Plague by 
attracting its virus to themselves • and I have heard that 
long ago, when the Plague was rife in any Border village, 
men were told off to parade around bearing Onions on the 
points of spears, to attract away the malaria. When the 
Onions became black, they were thought to have done the 
business, and were then solemnly buried in a corner of the 
Kirkyard. I believe there was long to be seen in Chirn- 
side churchyard a flat stone beneath which report declared 
the Plague lay buried, and woe be to the man who should 
disturb it. The memory of this seems, however, to have 
died out. My researches to locate it have been vain. 
Leyden writes of just such a Plague tombstone : 
Mark, in yon vale a solitary stone, 
Shunned by the swain, with loathsome weeds o’ergrown, 
The yellow stonecrop shoots from every pore, 
With scaly sapless lichens crusted o’er ; 
235 
