122 
SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
in the “ Sheep-shearing Feast/’ we find, the Clown 
requires 
three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice,—what 
will this sister of mine do with rice ? But my father hath 
made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. She hath 
made me four-and-twenty nosegays for the shearers, three- 
man-song-men all, and very good ones ; but they are most of 
them means and bases; but one puritan amongst them, and 
he sings psalms to hornpipes. I must have saffron to colour 
the warden pies; mace; dates?—none, that’s out of my 
note; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger, but that I 
may beg. 
The whole is worth quoting, since it calls up to our 
mind what was once a very popular rustic festival, 
now, like many others, extinct. 
Old Tusser, in his “ Five Hundred Points of Good 
Husbandry,” thus alludes to it : 
Wife, make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corne, 
Make wafers and cakes, for our sheepe must be shorne ; 
At sheepe shearing, neighbours none other things cran, 
But good cheese and welcome like neighbours tohan. 
But to return to the nutmeg. It is the fruit, or 
part of it, of the tree called by botanists Myrista 
officinalis , a native of the Moluccas, principally in 
those known as the Islands of Banda. Gerard 
describes it, but could not have done so except from 
hearsay, as it is not supposed to have been intro¬ 
duced into these islands until 1795. Mace is the 
name given to the curious perforated coat (< arillus ) 
which grows up round the nut, and is really developed 
from the hilum after fertilization. We get an 
example in other forms in the so-called “ berries ” of 
the yew and the silky hairs of the willow. Mace is 
only once referred to in the lines we have given. It 
was known and used as early as the fourteenth 
century. Among the names generally used for spices 
in Shakespeare’s time we may take “ pepper,” by us 
