Just by the door that led into the paddock, there was a plant of woodruff. Very delicate and sweet is the scent of this little flower. It grows in great patches under the hazel trees of the Edge Wood. Formerly woodruff was used in church decoration, and was deftly woven into many garlands. In the north of Europe woodruff is still used as a herb to flavour drinks. I never heard of this being done in England, but in Shropshire it is often culled in the farmhouses to put in muslin bags, in the place of lavender. It has a sweet scent, which remains with letters and kerchiefs like a memory of the past. Then there was, I saw, a plant of wormwood, the plant from which absinthe is distilled. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the leaves of this plant were chopped up for flavouring, and it was thought an excellent seasoning to venison. By the wormwood there was a line of camomile. A little later in the summer the plants will be covered with little white star-like blossoms. Burbidge will cut stalks and flowers and his wife will dry them in the sun, and give them away to the parents of sick children. "My missus," the old man once said to me, "mostly does her kindnesses by nastiness. Her will," he added, "fair poison a body to keep her alive." But though Burbidge allows himself the privilege of a free tongue as regards his wife's remedies, he permits no criticism elsewhere. On one occasion one of "his boys" objected to a gigantic draught of ales-hoof and mallow, flavoured with camomile. "What dost thee stand there for, loselling?" was the vigorous rebuke I heard addressed by my old friend, as the victim hesitated to drink down at a gulp, a bumper of a frothy brown fluid. "I tell thee, Roderick, if it fair blows off thy stomach, it will make a new man of thee." "I canna," feebly protested Burbidge's man. But he had to; for as my old gardener said, with a purple face of wrath, "I and my missus don't make physic for folks to chuck abroad, and a man that works under, needs must drink under." Whatever the immediate effect of the awful beverage was, I cannot say, but this I do know, Roderick did not die; he even looked as usual a week later. Few gardeners now have their herb plots, but through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ladies and their waiting-women made household medicines, and administered these themselves to the villagers, and to the members of their households. Suddenly, whilst I was looking at my herbs and thinking of how they were used in earlier days, the garden door was thrown abruptly open and Bess danced in before me. "What a time you have been away!" she cried. "I can't run about, and only look at flowers or watch idle birds. Hals is coming, that is what I have to think of." I went into the house after luncheon, my chair and table were carried out, and I sat and embroidered. This time I worked a cherubim's face, who possessed long locks and had dark-blue eyes.