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Updated: June 2, 2025
Hilma gasped, her eyes widening till the full round of the pupil was disclosed. Instantly, a certain, inexplicable guiltiness overpowered her with incredible confusion. Her hands trembled as she pressed the bundle of cresses into a hard ball between her palms. Annixter continued to talk. He was disturbed and excited himself at this unexpected meeting.
Now all the brambles and shingle are gone, and the stream is condemned to "loiter round its cresses," and to do nothing else. The water must not be more than six inches deep, and it must not flow too fast. To secure these conditions little dams, some made of earth and some of boards, are built from side to side of the brook.
Hence, in very hard weather all the birds flock to the cress-beds, where they find running water and a certain quantity of food. If the beds do freeze, the cress is destroyed, and the loss is very serious. Gathering cresses is a very pleasant job in summer, but in early spring one of the most cheerless occupations conceivable short of gathering Iceland moss.
On that day they dined together, the men on one side and the women on the other. The rushy papyrus formed the couches; bread was their only meat, water their drink, salt the seasoning, and cresses the delicacy. They would keep no slaves, saying that all men were born equal. Nobody spoke, unless it was to propose a question out of the Old Testament, or to answer the question of another.
He was nearly helpless, and lay in bed most of the time, smoking, while she peeled willows at a sou a day, trudged up and down with herbs, cresses, or any little thing she could find to sell.
The artificial culture of water-cress is comparatively modern, and a remarkably pretty side-industry of the country. Formerly, the cress gatherer was usually a gipsy, or "vagrom man," who wandered up to the springs and by the head waters of brooks at dawn, and took his cresses as the mushroom-gatherer takes mushrooms by dint of early rising and trespass.
One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with, otherwise where would any honey-wine be left? Another thinks that men grow out of the earth like cresses. -Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.
When the busy child came back, she set to work to carefully wash the cresses, arranging them afterwards in a pretty plate of her own, and then, placing them and the violets she had saved in front of the kind old woman, lifted up her bright face for a kiss. But Mrs Flanagan was unable even to say "Thank you, my bird." Her face was buried in her blue checked apron.
It was mute and dusty, with a tangle of strings; but the Stranger set it against his knee, and began to mend it deftly, talking the while in murmurs as a brook talks in a covert of cresses.
But you must remember that with sudden poverty comes, often, shrinking pride, and a degree of suspicion, and high scorn of those belittled pensioners who hang upon old ties; that old age, when it is sorely beset, is not always patient, clear-sighted, and just; that, when the heart of a young girl, in Sally's extremity, carries the helpless love that had been clad in purple, and couched in eider, and pampered with bonny cats, and served in gold, to Pride, and asks, "Stern master, what shall I do with this now?" the answer will be, "Strip it of its silken fooleries, let it lie on the ground, the broad bosom of its honest, hearty mother, teach it the wholesomeness of brown bread and cresses, fairly earned, and water from the spring, and let it wait on itself, and wait for the rest!"
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