Another baby story--but this belongs to Charles I.'s time--it happened, in fact, in the last month of that melancholy reign. It was seven o'clock in the evening. A certain ship-chandler became suddenly so foolish as to busy himself over a barrel of gunpowder with a candle. Naturally a spark fell into the barrel, and he was not even left time enough to express his regrets. Fifty houses were wrecked. How many were killed no one could tell, but at the next house but one, the Rose Tavern, there was a great company holding the parish dinner, and they all perished. Next morning, however, there was found on the leads of All Hallows Barking a young child in a cradle as newly laid in bed, neither child nor cradle having sustained the least harm. It was never known who the child was, but she was adopted by a gentleman of the parish, and lived certainly to the age of seventeen, when the historian saw her going to call her master, who was drinking at a tavern. It is two hundred and fifty years ago. That young woman may have at this moment over a thousand descendants at least. Who would not like to boast that she was his great-grandmother? A reform of vast importance, though at first it seems a small thing, was introduced in this reign. It was the restoration of vegetables and roots as part of daily diet. Harrison is my authority. He says that in old days--as in the time of the First Edward--herbs, fruits, and roots were much used, but that from Henry IV. to Henry VIII. the use of them decayed and was forgotten. "Now," he says, "in my time their use is not only resumed among the poore commons--I mean of melons, pompines, gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirrets, parsneps, carrots, marrowes, turnips, and all kinds of salad herbes--but they are also looked upon as deintie dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobilitie, who make their provision yearly for new seeds out of strange countries from whence they have them abundantly." Perhaps the cause of the disuse of roots and vegetables was the enormous rise in wages after the Black Death, when the working-classes, becoming suddenly rich, naturally associated roots with scarcity of beef, and governed themselves accordingly. The use of tobacco spread as rapidly, when once it was introduced, as that of coffee later on. King James speaks of those who spend as much as £300 a year upon this noxious weed. Those who took tobacco attributed to it all the virtues possible for any plant to possess, and more. It was the custom of the better sort of citizens to have gardens outside the City, each with its own garden-house, in some cases a mere arbor, but in others a house for residence in the summer months. Moorfields had many of these gardens, but Bethnal Green, Hoxton (Hoggesden), and Mile End were favorite spots for these retreats. Of course, the city madams were accused of using these gardens as convenient places for intrigue.