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Updated: June 18, 2025
We have seen him standing in a busy thoroughfare with his pennyworth of groundsel, and we know that though he receives many pennies his stock remains intact, and we know also that pennyworths of water-cress in the dirty hands of an old woman serve only the same purpose. Room 7. Here we find a younger but not more hopeful couple; she is fairly well dressed, and he is rather flashy.
"And so it came to pass that just when the thrush was becoming domesticated, and almost happy at the cottage, one morning the sailor brought him fresh turf and groundsel, besides his meal-cake, and took the cage down. And the old woman kissed the wires, and bade the bird good-bye, and blessed her son, and prayed Heaven to bring him safe home again; and they went their way.
As the grass on the plot before our house did not form a fine even turf, the ground was trenched and sown with good seed, but along with the grass a vast crop of thistles and groundsel appeared, which attracted quantities of goldfinches, and in the early mornings I have seen as many as sixty to eighty of these beautiful birds feeding on it.
And almost immediately I heard a cart pass, and a hawker crying: "Ground-SEL! Groundsel for your dickey-birds!" To think that there are people who get up at that unearthly hour to buy groundsel for their canaries! I looked to see whether any one had called in my absence; their cards should be on my table.
By-and-by the golden wheat calls for an army of workers; but the moucher passes on and gathers groundsel. Then come the mushrooms: he knows the best places, and soon fills a basket full of 'buttons' picking them very early in the morning. These are then put in 'punnets' by the greengrocers and retailed at a high price.
The women are all crazy about him, and it's been an even thing between my wife and Miss Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I'll bet on my wife every time, when it comes to a thing like that. He's a good-looking fellow some kind of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is Altruria, anyway?" I told him, and he said: "Oh yes.
These islets, which are raised only from 10 to 12 feet above the level of the sea, are a mere mass of coral and shells with a very small variety of plants struggling to establish themselves upon some of them. I was rather surprised to find a few plants of the common groundsel on one of the barest.
Here, on a green slope we saw a poor lad sitting chirruping upon the grass, with a little cloutful of groundsel for bird meat in his hand, watching another, who was on his knees, delving for earth-nuts with an old knife.
She remembered vividly what her emotions had been as a child, on finding her canary dead in its cage; how she had wept all day, not so much for its loss as from the recollection of the many times when she had failed to cheer it with sugar, and groundsel, and play, and of the number of hours when she had needlessly covered up its cage in impatience at its song, shutting out its sunshine, and changing the brightest seasons of its little life into dull night.
The green-finch that beautiful-winged Mrs Gummidge among birds is also abundant, and slips down nervously every now and then among the groundsel in the unweeded garden. I confess the greenfinch has all my sympathy, but it rather bores me. What the deuce is it worrying about? There is no poetry in its lamentation only a sort of habitual formula of a poor, lorn woman.
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