Yet There Are Some Who Would Like To Spoil This Innocent
Festival.
I have heard of some wealthy people living in a village who do
their utmost to break up the old custom by giving presents of money to
all the poor children who will go to school on that day instead of
a-Maying.
A very pitiful thing truly! Give them the money, and let them
go a-Maying as well. The same bribe they repeat at Christmas to stay the
boys from going round mumming. It is in spring that the folk make most
use of herbs, such as herb tea of gorse bloom. One cottage wife exclaimed
that she had no patience with women so ignorant they did not know how to
use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most of the gardens have a few
plants of the milky-veined holy thistle - good, they say, against
inflammations, and in which they have much faith. Soon after the May
garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 'dead men's hands,'
and after that the 'ram's-horn' orchis, which has a twisted petal; and in
the evening the bat, which they call flittermouse, appears again.
The light is never the same on a landscape many minutes together, as all
know who have tried, ever so crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of
the earth with pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you
walk by the hedges day by day there is always some fresh circumstance of
nature, the interest of which in a measure blots out the past.
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