The Tonic Wild Cherry 
mountains. More common with us than the pearly ever¬ 
lasting is the sweet life-everlasting, which is easily recog¬ 
nized by its smaller flower heads and a delicious fragrance, 
like that of slippery elm, which exhales from the entire 
plant. It is a peculiarity of flowers of this order that the 
true blossoms are surrounded by a dense involucre of 
chaffy scales almost destitute of moisture, and because of 
this they undergo scarcely any change in the process of dry¬ 
ing and may be kept for years with little loss of beauty. 
Such flowers are common in Europe as well as here, and 
the French know them as immortelles—a term which we 
have imported into our own tongue. 
Now is the time to gather the wild black cherries if you 
are a believer in the old-fashioned tonic that is made by 
soaking this bitter fruit in whisky. There is many a little 
tree along our lane hanging thick with the long strag¬ 
gling racemes of the black pea-shaped fruit. It is plump 
and juicy now, with a characteristic bitterish flavor which 
is very agreeable to many people, and which is almost 
identical with that of peach stones. Birds are very fond 
of these cherries, as well as of the kindred wild species, 
the choke cherry, but when eaten by them to excess it is 
said a sort of intoxication is produced. 
Our bitter wild cherries were not at all to the taste of 
the early English explorers of our land, one of whom, 
writing of them two or three centuries ago, says in disgust: 
“They so furred the mouth that the tongue will cleave to 
the roof and the throat was hoarse with swallowing those 
red bullies (as I may call them), being little better in 
taste. English ordering may bring them to be an English 
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