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WOOD SPURGE. The juice of this plant has been known to produce very dangerous swellings in the mouth and throat of persons who have occasionally put it into their mouths. We do not know that it is very dangerous; and nothing is likely to tempt any persons to use it as food or otherwise. MERCURIALIS perennis.
But at that spot some great spurge-plants hung this way and that, leaning aside, as if the sterns were too weak to uphold the heads of dark-green leaves. Thin grasses, perfectly white, bleached by the sun and dew, stood in a bunch by the spurge; their seeds had fallen, the last dregs of sap had dried within them, there was nothing left but the bare stalks.
"Upstairs, now?" said Spurge with a doubtful glance at the ramshackle stairway. "Lord, mister! I don't believe nobody could get up them stairs! No they've hooked it through the back here, into the Warren. And once in there " He ended with an eloquent gesture, and dismounting from his perch made his way along the passage to a door which opened into the shed.
"Old Chatfield's daughter's gone in there, where Andrius went. Just now!" "What the play-actress!" said Spurge. "You don't say, guv'nor? Ha! that explains everything that's the missing link! Ha! But we'll soon know what they're after, Mr. Copplestone. Follow me quiet as a mouse." Once more submitting to be led, Copplestone followed his queer guide along the alley.
"I did not," he answered. "I was there until a quarter-past three then I went away. And no Oliver had come out o' that door when I left." Spurge and his visitor sat staring at each other in silence for a few minutes; the silence was eventually broken by Copplestone. "Of course," he said reflectively, "if Mr. Oliver was looking round those ruins he could easily spend half an hour there."
"A thousand pound is a vast lot o' money, guv'nor! Now, if I was to tell something as I knows of, what chances should I have of getting that there money?" "That depends," replied Copplestone. "The reward is to be given to but you see the plain wording of it. Can you give information of that sort?" "I can give a certain piece of information, guv'nor," said Spurge.
Here the spurge drinks of the wine of heaven with golden lips wide open; but the hellebore, which has already lost all its vernal greenness, and is parched by the drought, ripens its drooping seeds sullenly on the shadowy side of the jutting crag, and seems to hate the sun. Higher and yet far below the plateau is a little field where the lately cut grass has been thrown into mounds.
"So we'd better lose no time in arranging our expedition out there. Spurge you're the man who knows the spot best what ought we to do about getting there in force?" Spurge, obviously flattered at being called upon to advise a great man, entered into the discussion with enthusiasm. "Your honour mustn't go in force at all!" he said. "What's wanted, gentlemen, is strategy!
A strange experience it is to enter the heart of a volcano that is still comparatively active, and to observe woods of poplar and a large pine tree beneath which grow masses of spring flowers—bright blue bugloss, the crimson vetch, starch hyacinths, purple self-heal, and golden spurge—and to pass from these thickets on to a space of bare white-coloured ground that trembles and sways under the feet like a sheet of insecure ice.
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