composite flowers of the wormwood (" wyrme wyrt"), Artemisia, of which we have four species native, viz., A. campestris, L.; A. vulgaris, L., the mugwort; A. Absinthium, L., the true wormwood, from which absinthe is distilled; and A. maritima, L., a plant of our sea-shores. In our herb-gardens we find the shrub called variously lad's-love, old-man, and southernwood (A. Abrotanum, L.), a native of Southern Europe. Alexis tells us the wormwood, which originally took its name from a powder made from it, which was very generally in use as a preservative of books and manuscripts, was used to keep moth and vermin from clothes, mingled with cedar and valerian (Alexis, ii. 14 in d.). It was also considered a sovereign specific in sea-sickness. In Shakespeare it is referred to metaphorically or actually in three places: Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii. 85; Romeo and Jnliet, I. iii. 26; Hamlet, III. ii. 191 ; and Lucrece, 1. 893; but none are worth quoting here, unless it be the last, where, in a list of comparisons, we read:

Thy sugar'd tongue to bitter wormwood taste.

"Artemisia is a name derived from Artemis, i.e. Diana, who is said to have found the herb and given it to Chiron the centaur; and so we get “Dian's bud" of the Midsummer-Night's Dream, IV. i. 78:

Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower

Hath such force and blessed power.

The cornfields are, however, as we have hinted, the feature of the month. The principal corn grown in England in Shakespeare's day was such as we moderns grow barley, oats, rye and wheat. Of each something must be said. The barley has been cultivated by man since the Eastern neolithic farmers invaded Europe. Several varieties of it

have been found among the débris of Swiss lakedwellings and elsewhere. Dr. Oswald Heer (" LakeDwellings," p. 529) tells us of two six-rowed barleys, a small and large; from the smaller he thinks the common four-rowed barley has descended, cultivation tending to lengthen the axes of the ears, and from this came at length the two-rowed species. The smallgrained six-rowed barley (Hordeum hexastichum sanctum) he considers the most ancient cultivated form; the other (H. hexastichum densum) was cultivated by the Stone Age people merely for experiment. The H. vulgare of to-day is the four-rowed descendant. Barley was grown at an early date in Egypt. From the barley, the beere plant, as its name implies, was early brewed "barley-broth," which was assumed to be the food of English soldiers in the jeering passage, Henry V., III. v. 18:

Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-rein'd jades, their barley-broth,
Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?

And Gerard says: "Our London Beere-Brewers would scorne to learne to make beere of either French or Dutch."

Barley is named in one other place, viz., the Tempest, IV. i. 60, in connection with other cereals. The oat is named in the same passage, and as the food for horses in Midsummer-Night's Dream, IV. i. 35, Taming of the Shrew, III. ii. 207, and other places. In Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii. 912, we have:

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws ;

again, we read how Oberon

in the shape of Corin sat all day,

Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love.

Midsummer-Night's Dream, II. i. 66.

Shepherds had imitated with the oat straws the

reeds of their great god Pan from the time of Ovid, and probably many centuries before (see" Met.,” i. 677, and Virgil's "Ecl.," i. 1). The grain does not appear to have been cultivated by our forefathers until the Bronze Age ("Lake-Dwellings," p. 579), but was then used both as a food for horses, and for oaten cakes and oatmeal, and it has retained its popularity till the present time. The true oat is the Avena sativa, L. We have several native species of the order, as we have of barley and wheat.

The rye (Secale cereale, L.) is comparatively little grown to-day, and then only as food for cattle. The old-world rye bread has quite died out of use among us, though on the Continent it is still used. It is the black bread (Schwarzbrod) of the German peasants. Gerard says: "It is harder to digest than wheat, yet to Rusticke bodies that can well digest it, it yields good nourishment." Not only is it quoted in the general list of grain given above, but in As You Like It, V. iii. 23:

Between the acres of the rye,

These pretty country folks would lie

—that is, on the grass strips between the ploughed acres and half-acres of the common fields.

again we get in the Tempest, IV. i. 136,

Make holiday-your rye-straw hats put on,

which sufficiently explains itself.

And

The rye is not such an ancient cereal as barley, and scarcely appears until the Age of Bronze.

The principal grain has ever been wheat—i.e., white, in contradistinction to black oats and rye. We get the forms "hwæte" and "hvaiteis." In the Stone Age it was largely grown, as, indeed, it had been for many centuries in Egypt, and we get several forms of the typical Triticum vulgare, Vill.—one a

*

small forın, from which all our cultivated varieties have been derived, called T. antiquorum, M. There has also been found a beardless form (T. compactum muticum), as well as the Egyptian wheat, spelt emmer" and "einkorn" (T. monococcum, L.). The poet mentions wheat in many places, once as forming the crown of peace, Hamlet, V. ii. 41:

As peace should still her wheaten garland wear. "White wheat" is spoken of in King Lear, III. iv. 120, red in 2 Henry IV., V. i. 15.

The generic term,"corn," occurs some twenty-three or more times, but it needs no comment here. The end of our month reminds us of another ending—that of harvest, with its harvest home, mell supper, kern supper, call it what you will, another old English custom now, alas! dying fast, and yet, doubtless, as old as the ending of the first harvest. As good a description as may be had is that quoted in Brand (vol. ii., p. 18,) from Stevenson's, Twelve Moneths" (1661, p. 37):

"The furmenty-pott welcomes home the harvest cart, and the garland of flowers crowns the captain of the reapers; the battle of the field is now stoutly fought. The pipe and the tabor are now busily set a-work; and the lad and the lass will have no lead on their heels. O! 'tis a merry time wherein honest neighbours make good cheer, and God is glorified in His blessings on the earth."

The absurd legend of the mummy wheat has been too often killed to need any further attacks on its veracity. † A dish still much used in Yorkshire.

IN

That time of year

OCTOBER

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

Sonnets lxxiii.

N this month the artist Nature completes her work of rendering the foliage of tree and flower resplendent in its death; lavish indeed is her hand with every shade of yellow, brown, and red, until the masses of elm-trees stand up upon their background of blue, as though wrought in molten gold, while away in the far distance the hills shade to purple and the deepest blues under the mellowing autumnal vapours.

Two or three flowers come forth to tell us the frost and sun are not yet here; the pink hue of the saffron, the gold of the marigold, and the honey-laden ivy, all blossom this month, as, too, does the clover, the honey-stalks of the poet, which, indeed, has been blossoming for many months past. A strange plant is the saffron (Crocus sativus, L.), largely cultivated in England in Shakespeare's time, but when introduced first is difficult to say. So important, however, was its cultivation that it has given the name to an Essex town, Saffron Walden, and to Saffron Hill in London. 7-2 [99]