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Take Scabious; Betony, Pimpernel, and Turmentine-roots, of each a pound, steep these all night in three gallons of strong Beer, and distil them all in a Limbeck, and when you use it, take a spoonful thereof every four hours, and sweat well after it, draw two quarts of water, if your Beer be strong, and mingle them both together. Poppy water.
From the broad landscape I turn to the wayside flowers: the agrimony, the little lotus, the candy-tuft getting rare now that I have left the arid stony region the blue scabious, and, pleasanter than all, the purple patches of dwarf thyme. It was not yet evening when I came to Lisle, a rather large village near the Dronne.
Purple heathbells gleam from shrub-like bunches dotted along the slope; purple knapweeds lower down in the grass; blue scabious, yellow hawkweeds where the soil is thinner, and harebells on the very summit; these are but a few upon which the eye lights while gliding by. Glossy thistledown, heedless whither it goes, comes in at the open window.
Quenrede, protesting her scepticism, but all the same palpably enjoying the magic experiment, picked an indifferent nosegay of the few buttercups, hawkweeds, and late pieces of scabious which were the only flowers available. Then she removed her hair-pins, and, letting down a shower of flaxen hair, commenced her winding pilgrimage among the old gray stones.
The garden behind the house was the girl's Eden. She had planted upon the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers; and here she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the sweet scabious.
Susan, on her part, continued to thread the narrow winding lanes that led towards Wantage; walking leisurely along, and forming as she went, half unconsciously, a nosegay of the wild flowers of the season; the delicate hare-bell, the lingering wood-vetch, the blue scabious, the heaths which clustered on the bank, the tall graceful lilac campanula, the snowy bells of the bindweed, the latest briar-rose, and that species of clematis, which, perhaps, because it generally indicates the neighbourhood of houses, has won for itself the pretty name of the traveller's joy, whilst that loveliest of wild flowers, whose name is now sentimentalised out of prettiness, the intensely blue forget-me-not, was there in rich profusion.
Torn pink ragged robins through whose petals a comb seems to have been remorselessly dragged, blue scabious, red knapweeds, yellow rattles, yellow vetchings by the hedge, white flowering parsley, white campions, yellow tormentil, golden buttercups, white cuckoo-flowers, dandelions, yarrow, and so on, all carelessly sown broadcast without order or method, just as negligently as they are named here, first remembered, first mentioned, and many forgotten.
The cliff was a tangle of flowers above and below, with poppies at the lip being blown out like red flame, and scabious leaning inquisitively to look down, and pink and white rest-harrow everywhere, very pretty. Siegmund stood at a bend where heath blossomed in shaggy lilac, where the sunshine but no wind came. He saw the blue bay curl away to the far-off headland.
She desired that these seeds might be sown by the border of the fountain, at the foot of her cocoa-tree. "The scabious," she added, "produces a beautiful flower of a pale blue, and a black ground spotted with white. You might fancy it was in mourning; and for this reason it is also called the widow's flower. It grows best in bleak spots, beaten by the winds."
Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf.
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