Mistletoe is not a Christmas decoration. It comes to us from the Druids, and belongs to the New Year. It is not allowed to appear in church, and should not be hung up in private houses till Christmas is over and the New Year has come. The hanging up of the mistletoe is in itself a beautiful survival of an ancient worship, and should be associated in our minds with Stonehenge and the prehistoric star temples, whose priests were astronomers. On New Year’s Day they solemnly distributed branches of the mistletoe to the people as a charm ensuring fertility. In December there are many hundredweight of mistletoe cut down and despatched from the ancient Druidical haunts of the Welsh border, and from over-sea Brittany, to all-devouring London, where it is heedlessly nailed up in doorways, and made the excuse for much giggling and embracing. May those who read these lines treat it with due reverence, and when they kiss beneath the beautiful strange branch with its white berries, think of our ancestors—the noble youths and lovely maidens of prehistoric days, who kissed three thousand years ago, and sent this living token of their happy lives down the long ages—to us, distracted hustlers of the motor-car. Prehistoric feeding may not be good for us, but the prehistoric rite of the mistletoe must not be neglected in these days of strange political aspirations on the part of those who have not discovered its sedative virtue. XL THE ORIGIN OF OPIUM That Europe is the original home of the opium-poppy, and not Asia, is even more contradictory of our settled traditions and belief than the fact that Europeans gave tobacco to the East. Yet it is the fact that opium, like tobacco, came to the Far East from Europe. The opium-poppy does not grow wild in Asia; it is a cultivated variety of a Mediterranean poppy, the _Papaver setigerum_, which has a pale purple flower, and was conveyed, long ago, by man from the Levant to Asia. We have true poppies of four species which grow wild in England, all with splendid scarlet or crimson petals, easily distinguished from one another by the shape of the seedboxes, or capsules, which they form. If you scratch the surface of the seed capsule of one of these poppies a milky juice appears. It is this which is collected from the capsules of the much larger opium-poppy in India and China, and when dried forms a hard brown cake, which is called “opium.” It consists of resinous matter, in which is contained a small quantity of the invaluable narcotic called “morphia,” and also small quantities of other powerful poisons.