Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other weed, the colewort, for cole or rape-seed, which has the quadruple properties of feeding cage-birds, yielding rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help to prop the husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and carraways are what "the faculty" knows as "carminatives," curative of flatulency; like the once popular "eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of the sea holly that grows by the estuaries of Essex rivers. Eringo root was once a favourite specific for lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last, and the preparation of it gradually died out and became extinct about 1865, when the only manufacturer was an elderly spinster who supplied a chemist in High Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway seeds, which look like commas, are those familiar denizens of "seed cake" that stick in the teeth and refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of "carraway comfits." Farmers who do not occupy themselves with seed-growing have passed through evil times, but prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's well-tilled land, and fruit-farming has come to render cultivation profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer, who cannot adapt himself to new conditions, agricultural depression in Essex is a very real thing. Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one, a small cultivator, a son of the soil. He does not hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural Essex, in these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the Workhouse are said to close every vista? Besides, he has been hard at work in the fields, and much of that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like friskiness out of the limbs. A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very badly in need of repair, elicits the fact that he has just come away, worsted, from another bout in the eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict with wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce, for life or a livelihood, with weeds--the sorry heritage of the present occupier from the slovenly or bankrupt farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing upon the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily against the cultivator.