In the fourteenth century, I have been told, snails were sold at Bath and in other towns in the west, to such as had consumptive tendencies. Knowing this, and seeing how much escargots were used in the Middle Ages, not only as a delicacy by the monks and nobles, but also in medicine with herbs, presumably amongst the poor, it is curious now, the horror that exists at the thought of eating either snails or frogs. At first, when I gave some dinners to the very needy, they would hardly dare come for them, and declared that they were sure that in Auguste's ragouts there would be found some lurking, somewhere. "Us doesn't dare to search in the broth," one old man said, "for us doesn't know what low beasts, slugs, snails, tadpoles, and what not a foreigner mightn't mix in." But now happily they are reassured, and old Ged Bebb told me only last week, "That, for all that they war heathan (the cook men), the meat war good, and proper, and what Christian folks cud eat." [Sidenote: FLOWERS OF TWILIGHT] I passed into the old red-walled garden and stopped to admire the long line of brilliant yellow crocuses. They were all aglow in the brilliant sunlight, and stood drawn up like a regiment of soldiers in line. I stood entranced, for each soldier seemed to be holding a lamp, and in each lamp, or cup, the sun was reflected in a wonderful golden glory. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the beauty of golden crocuses in golden sunlight. They seem to fill the world with gladness and to be March's crowning glory. I stopped and looked at my clumps of crocuses, they were coming up gaily, but were yet hardly in blossom. Burbidge put in for me strong clumps of Sir Walter Scott, Rizzio, and of beautiful Mont Blanc. All these were pushing up bravely, out of their mother earth. In fact, they were bursting, as Bess calls it, to be out. A minute later, I turned to inspect my chionodoxas and scillas. A few were coming into bloom. Luciliae had several sprays of delicate china blue and white flowers, and coppery two-blade leaves, and a patch of blue _Scilla Sibirica_ had reared already a spray or two of gorgeous ultramarine blossoms; but it was still early in March, and that is the time of the promise of beautiful things, not yet the realization of Flora's _fête_.