Poppy pericarps made famous pepper-boxes, from which the seed could be shaken as pepper; dishes and cups, too, for dolls' tea-tables, and tiny handles of strong grass stems could be attached to the cups. For the child's larder, hollyhocks furnished food in their mucilaginous cheeses, and the insipid akenes of the sunflower and seeds of pumpkins swelled the feast. A daintier morsel, a drop of honey, the "clear bee-wine" of Keats, could be sucked from the curved spur of the columbine, and the scarlet-and-yellow trumpet of the beautiful coral honeysuckle, mellifluous of the name, as well as from the tubes of the heads of clover. We ate rose-leaves, also, and grass roots, and smarting peppergrass. The sorrel and oxalis (which we called "ladies' sorrel") and the curling tendrils of grape-vines gave an acid zest to our childish nibblings and browsings. The gnarled plum trees at the end of the garden exuded beautiful crystals of gum, of which we could say proudly, like Cornelia, "These are my jewels." Translucent topaz and amber were never more beautiful, and, void of settings, these pellucid gems could be stuck directly on the fingers or on the tip of the ear. And when our vanity was sated with the bravery, or we could no longer resist our appetite, there still remained another charm: with childish opulence, like Cleopatra, we swallowed our jewels. A low-growing mallow, wherever it chanced to run, shared with its cousin hollyhock the duty of providing cheeses. These mallow cheeses were also eaten by English children. In allusion to this the poet Clare wrote:-- "The sitting down when school was o'er Upon the threshold of the door, Picking from mallows, sport to please, The crumpled seed we call a cheese." These flower customs never came to us through reading. All our English story-books told of making cowslip balls, of breaking the shepherd's purse, of playing lords and ladies with the arum--what we call jack-in-the-pulpit; yet we never thought of making any kindred attempts with these or similar flowers. We did gather eagerly the jack-in-the-pulpit, whose singularity of aspect seems always to attract the attention of children, and by pinching it at the base of the flower made it squeak, "made Jack preach." But like true republicans we never called our jacks lords and ladies. The only liking we had for the portulaca was in gathering the seeds which grew in little boxes with a lid opening in a line around the middle. Oh, dear! It doesn't seem like the same thing to hear these beloved little seed-boxes described as "a pyxis, or a capsule with a circumscissile dehiscence."