The
HEALTHY
LIFE
The Independent
Health Magazine
VOLUME V
July-December 1913
LONDON
GRAHAM HOUSE, TUDOR ST., E.C.
INDEX
VOLUME V.—JULY-DECEMBER 1913
- Ballade of Skyfaring, A, S. Gertrude Ford, 490
- Book Reviews, 532
- Breathe, On Learning to, Dr J. Stenson Hooker, 630
- Camping Out, C.R. Freeman, 438, 480
- Care of Cupboards, Florence Daniel, 530
- Castles in the Air, E.M. Cobham, 582
- Cloud-capped Towers, E.M. Cobham, 626
- Correspondence, 504, 533, 580, 658
- Cottage Cheese, 658
- Curtained Doorways, The, Edgar J. Saxon, 561
- Doctor on Doctors, A, 637
- Doctor's Reason for Opposing Vaccination, A, Dr J.W. Hodge, 597
- Doctors and Health, 633
- Fasting, A Significant Case, A. Rabagliati, M.D., 458, 492
- Fear and Imagination, E.M. Cobham, 510
- Food and the Source of Bodily Energy, 507
- Fruit-Oils and Nuts, 659
- Futurist Gardening, G.G. Desmond, 451
- Health Queries, Dr H. Valentine Knaggs:—
- About Sugar, 540;
- Bad Case of Self-poisoning, 502;
- Boils, their Cause and Cure, 498;
- Canary versus Jamaica Bananas, 579;
- Can Malaria be Prevented? 466;
- Cereal Food in the Treatment of Neuritis, 619;
- Correct Blending of Foods, 655;
- Concerning Cottage Cheese, 617;
- Deafness, 615, 616;
- Diet for Obstinate Cough, 618;
- Diet for Ulcerated Throat, 575;
- Dilated Heart, 653;
- Difficulties in Changing to Non-Flesh Diet, 655;
- Dry Throat, 653;
- Eczema as a Sign of Returning Health, 613;
- Excessive Perspiration,
- Imagination in Insurance, E.M. Cobham,
- Learning to Breathe, On, Dr J. Stenson Hooker, 630
- Letters of a Layman, I., 633
- Lime Juice, Pure, 534
- Longevity, A Remedy for, Edgar J. Saxon, 491
- Mental Healing, A Scientific Basis for, J. Stenson Hooker, M.D., 456
- Midsummer Madness, Edgar J. Saxon, 454
- Modern Germ Mania: A Case in Point, Dr H.V. Knaggs, 638
- More About Two Meals a Day, Wilfred Wellock, 487
- New Race, The, S. Gertrude Ford, 601
- Ode to the West Wind, Shelley, 555
- Pickled Peppercorns, Peter Piper, 464, 570, 609, 660
- Plain Words and Coloured Pictures, Edgar J. Saxon, 622
- Play Spirit, The, D.M. Richardson, 602
- Play Spirit, The: A Criticism, L.E. Hawks, 628
- Quest for Beauty, The, Edgar J. Saxon, 523
- Recipes, 462, 571, 610, 641
- Remedy for Longevity, A, Edgar J. Saxon, 491
- Remedy for Sleeplessness, 533
- Salads and Salad Dressings, 462
- Salt Cooked Vegetables, 506
- Swan Song of September, The, S. Gertrude Ford, 523
- Sea-sickness, Some Remedies, Hereward Carrington, 484
- Semper Fidelis, “A.R.,” 526
- Sleeplessness, A Remedy, 533
- Scientific Basis for Mental Healing, A, J. Stenson Hooker, M.D.,
- Taste or Theory? Arnold Eiloart, B.Sc., 643
- Travels in Two Colours, Edgar J. Saxon, 605
- To-morrow's Flowers, G.G. Desmond, 451
- Two Meals a Day, More About, Wilfred Wellock, 487
- Vaccination, A Doctor's Reason for Opposing, Dr J.W. Hodge, 597
- Vegetalism, The Scientific Basis of, Prof. H. Labbé, 549, 584
- West Wind, Ode to, Shelley, 555
- What makes a Holiday? C., 557
- World's Wanderers, The, Shelley, 625
Vol. V
No. 24 July
1913
There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one another.—Claude Bernard.
AN INDICATION.
Some laymen are very fond of deprecating the work of specialists, holding that specialisation tends to narrowness, to inability to see more than one side of a question.
It is, of course, true that the specialist tends to “go off at a tangent” on his particular subject, and even to treat with contempt or opposition the views of other specialists who differ from him. But all work that is worth doing is attended by its own peculiar dangers. It is here that the work of the non-specialist comes in. It is for him to compare the opposing views of the specialists, to reveal one in the light thrown by the other, to help into existence the new truth waiting to be born of the meeting of opposites.
Specialisation spells division of labour, and apart from division of labour certain great work can never be done. To do away with such division, supposing an impossibility to be possible, would simply mean primitive savage. But we have no call to attempt the abolition of even the minutest division of labour. What is necessary is to understand and guard against its dangers.
Specialisation may lead to madness, as electricity may lead to death. But no specialist need go far astray who, once in a while, will make an honest attempt to come to an understanding with the man whose views are diametrically opposed to his own. For thus he will retain elasticity of brain, and gain renewed energy for, and perhaps fresh light on, his own problems.—[Eds.]
CAMPING OUT.
IV. The Five-Foot Sausage.
The question of blankets and mattresses may be taken as settled. We can now sleep quite comfortably, take our fresh air sleeping and waking, and find shelter when it rains. But that same fresh air brings appetite and we must see how that appetite is to be appeased.
Take a frying-pan. It should be of aluminium for lightness; though a good stout iron one will help you make good girdle-cakes, if you get it hot and drop the flour paste on it. You must find some other way of making girdle-cakes, and if you take an iron frying pan with you, don't say that I told you to.
Though it is obviously necessary that a frying-pan should have a handle, I was bound to tell Gertrude that I do not find it convenient to take handled saucepans when I go camping. I take for all boiling purposes, including the making of tea, what is called a camp-kettle. Most ironmongers of any standing seem to keep it, and those who have it not in stock can show you an illustration of it in their wholesale list. It is just like the pot in which painters carry their paint, except that it has an ordinary saucepan lid. You should have a “nest” of these—that is, three in diminishing sizes going one inside the other. The big lid then fits on the outer one and the two other lids have to be carried separately.
The Five-Foot Sausage
You hang these camp-kettles over the fire by their bucket handles, from the tripod or other means of getting over the fire. Sometimes the bough of a tree high out of the reach of the flames will do. Sometimes a stick or oar thrust into the bank or in a crevice of the wall behind the fire is more convenient than a tripod. Again, you can do without any hanging at all, making a little fireplace of bricks or stones and standing the saucepans “on the hob.”
It is a simple thing to tie the tops of three sticks together and make a tripod. Then from the place where they join you dangle a piece of string, pass it through the handle of the kettle and tie it to itself, in a knot that can be adjusted
These are the cooking utensils. A biscuit tin would make an oven and Gertrude says she must have an oven. For my part I would not attempt baking when camping out and I will say no more about ovens, except that all the biscuit tins in the world won't beat a hole in the ground first filled with blazing sticks and then with the things to be baked and covered with turves till they are done.
I had great difficulty in persuading Gertrude to feed out of tin dishes like those which we use sometimes for making shallow round cakes or setting the toffee in. They are ever so much better than plates, being deep enough for soup-plates and not easy to upset when you use them on your lap. Any number of the same size will go into one another and a dozen scarcely take up more room than one.
It was worse still when it came to a still more useful substitute, the camp equivalent of the teacup. In the first place we abolish the saucer, for the simple reason that we have no earthly use for it in camp. We take tin mugs with sloping sides and wire bucket handles. They fit into one another in the same accommodating way as the eating dishes. Gertrude was nearly put off this device altogether by Basil's remark that he had only seen them in use in poulterers' shops, where they are put under hares' noses....
“Basil, you, you monster,” cried Gertrude, and I had to push those tin mugs as though I had been a traveller interested in the sale of them.
The drinking of hot tea out of these mugs is quite a beautiful art. You hold the wire handle between finger and thumb and put the little finger at the edge of the bottom rim. It is thus able to tilt the mug to the exact angle which is most convenient for drinking. When Gertrude had learnt the trick, she became perfectly enamoured of the mugs. She sometimes brings one out at ordinary afternoon tea and insists that the tea is ever so much better drunk thus than out of spode.
Smaller mugs of the same shape do for egg-cups, and the egg-spoons I take to camp are the bone ones, seldom asked for but easy to get in most oil-and-colour shops. Dessert spoons and forks and table knives are of the usual pattern, but the former can be had in aluminium and therefore much lighter than Britannia metal.
The camping-out valise is by all means the rucksack. Never the knapsack. I am almost ashamed to say this, because as far as my knowledge goes the knapsack is now obsolete. It may be, however, that it lingers here and there. If you see one, buy it for a museum if you like but not for use. The bundle should be allowed to fit itself to the back, as it does in a canvas bag. Suppose now that you fix the V point of a pair of braces somewhere near the top of the sack and bringing the webs over your shoulders, fix them, nicely adjusted, to the lower corners of the sack, it will ride quite comfortably upon your back—that is, you have made it from a plain sack into a rucksack or back-sack. Get or make as many good large strong ones as you have shoulders in the party to carry them. Have them made of a waterproof canvas, green or brown, to reeve up tight with strong cord passed through a series of eyelet-holes and, if you would be quite certain of keeping out the rain, with a little hood to cover the reeved bag end.
The great bulk of your luggage you will generally find it best to carry by wheeling it on a bicycle. Spread your ground-sheet on the floor. On that lay your blankets, doubled so as to make a smaller square, tent, mattress cover and bed suits on that, then your camping utensils and all other paraphernalia and roll the whole up into a sausage about five feet long, when the loose ends of the ground-sheet have been tucked over as in a brown-paper parcel. Tie it well with whipcord and fasten it to the top bar of your bicycle frame, leaving freedom of course for the handles and the front wheel to move and steer. Push the tent-poles through the lashings and start for your camp at a comfortable four or five miles an hour. You will find it easy to move camp at the rate of twenty miles a day and will see a great deal of country in the course of a fortnight.
The sausage on the bicycle shown in the illustration may be taken to contain all the gear and a little food. The rucksacks will take the rest and each man's most precious personal belongings. There is a small parcel tied to the handle-bar, scarcely to be seen because it is smaller than the end of the sausage. It is a complete tent tied up in its ground-sheet.
C.R. Freeman.
HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT: A WARNING.
This article, by one of the pioneers of modern dietetics, is in the nature of a challenge, and is certain to arouse discussion among all who have studied the food question closely.—[Eds.]
When men lived on their natural food, quantities settled themselves. When a healthy natural appetite had been sated the correct quantity of natural food had been taken.
To-day all this is upside down, there is no natural food and only too often no natural healthy appetite either. Thus the question of quantity is often asked and many go wrong over it. The all-sufficient answer to this question is: “Go back to the foods natural to the human animal and this, as well as a countless number of other problems, will settle themselves.”
But supposing that this cannot be done, suppose, as is often the case, that the animal fed for years on unnatural food has become so pathological that it can no longer take or digest its natural food?
Those who take foods which are stimulants are very likely to overeat, and when they leave off their stimulants they are equally likely to underfeed themselves. Flesh foods are such stimulants, for it is possible to intoxicate those quite unaccustomed to them with a large ration of meat just as well as with a large ration of alcohol. The one leads to the other, meat leads to alcohol, alcohol to meat. Taking any stimulant eventually leads to a call for other stimulants.
How are we to tell when a given person is getting enough food, either natural or partly natural? Medically speaking, there is no difficulty; there are plenty of guides to the required knowledge, some of them of great delicacy and extreme accuracy. The trouble generally is that these guides are not made use of, as the cause of the disaster is not suspected. A physiologist is not consulted till too late, perhaps till the disorder in the machinery of life is beyond repair.
Diminishing energy and power, decreasing endurance, slowing circulation, lessening blood colour, falling temperature, altered blood pressure, enlarging heart and liver, are some of the most obvious signs with which the physician is brought into contact in such cases. But every one of these may, and very often does, pass unnoticed for quite a long time by those who have had no scientific training. The public are extremely ignorant on such matters because the natural sciences have been more neglected in this country in the last fifty years than anywhere else in Europe, and
Being themselves ignorant and without having studied physiology, even in its rudiments, they do not appear to consider that they should at least abstain from teaching others till they have got something certain for themselves.
If the public were less ignorant they would soon see through their pretensions; but, as it is, things go from bad to worse, and it is not too much to say that hundreds of lives have been lost down this sordid by-path of human avarice.
On one single day a few weeks ago the writer heard of three men, two of whom had been so seriously ill that their lives were in danger, and one of whom had died. The certified cause of death in this case might not have led the uninitiated to suspect chronic starvation, but those who were behind the scenes knew that this was its real cause. A further extraordinary fact was that two out of these three men were members of the medical profession, whose training in physiology ought, one would have thought, to have saved them from such errors.
The conclusion seems to be that they did not use their knowledge because at first they had no suspicion of the real cause of their illness. In other words, chronic starvation is insidious and, if no accurate scientific measurements are made, its results, being attributed to other causes, are often allowed to become serious before they are properly treated.
These three men went wrong by following a layman quite destitute of physiological training, who appeared to have produced some wonderful results in himself and others on extraordinarily small quantities of food.
If the above tests had been made at once by a trained hand the error involved in such results could not have escaped detection, and none of these men would have endangered their lives. I myself examined the layman in question and finding him not up to standard refused to follow him. The writer has no difficulty in recalling at least a dozen cases similar to those above mentioned which have been under his care in the last twelve months, and the three above mentioned were none of them under his care at the time of their danger.
What, then, must be our conclusions in reference to these and similar facts of which it is only possible to give a mere outline here? I suggest that they are:—
- Food quantities are of extreme importance.
- These quantities were settled by physiologists many years ago, and no good reasons have since been adduced for altering them.
- The required quantity is approximately nine or ten grains of proteid per day for each pound of bone and muscle in the body weight.
- Any considerable departure from this quantity continued over months and years leads to disaster.
- The nature of this disaster may appear to be very various and its real cause is thus frequently overlooked.
I will say a few words about each of these except the first, which is already obvious. The layman above mentioned asserted that he could live on but little more than half this quantity, but the food quantity really required is that which will keep up normal strength, normal circulation, normal colour, normal temperature and normal mental power. As we have got perfectly definite standards of all these normal conditions, serious danger can only be run into by neglecting to measure them.
It is also possible to tell fairly accurately the quantity of food a man is taking in a day, and then, by collecting and estimating his excreta, the quantity also out of this food which he is utilising completely and burning up in his body.
You would say that no danger should be possible with all these safeguards, and yet the above case history shows that of two trained physiologists, members of the medical profession, one died at least twenty years before his time, and the other was in great danger and only recovered slowly and with difficulty. Another similar case came to the writer suffering from increasing debility and what appeared to be some form of dyspepsia. He was quite unable to pass any of the above-named tests as to physiological standards, and an investigation of his excreta showed that his food was at least one-fifth or one-sixth below its proper quantity and had probably been so for many months past. Some of his doctors had been giving his “disease” a more or less long list of names and yet had not noted the one essential fact of chronic defective nutrition and its cause—underfeeding. Naturally their treatment was of no avail, but when he had been sent to a nursing home and had put back the 20 lbs. of weight he had lost he came slowly back to more normal standards and is now out of danger. In this case there was marked loss of weight, and few people, one would think, would overlook such a sign of under nutrition. But loss of weight is not always present in these cases, at least not at first. Some people tend to grow stout on deficient proteid, and then the fact that some of the essential tissues of the body (the muscles, the heart and the blood) are being dangerously impoverished is very likely to be overlooked. In the case last mentioned the loss of weight was put down to the dyspepsia, whereas the real fact was that the “dyspepsia” and loss of weight were both results of a chronic deficiency in food.
It is evident that some care about food quantities must be taken by all those who do not live on natural foods. For physiologists there is no difficulty in settling the question of quantity in accordance with the signs of the physiology of a normal body. That all, even physiologists, may run into danger if, while living on unnatural or partly unnatural foods, or while making any change of food, they do not consider the question of quantity with sufficient care.
That the question of nutrition should be considered in relation to every illness even though it may appear on the surface to have no direct connection with foods or quantities. As a matter of fact, the nature of the food and its quantity controls all the phenomena of life. Some twenty years ago most people lived fairly close to the old physiological quantities, now they have been cut adrift from these and completely unsettled and are floundering out of their depth. A most unsatisfactory, even dangerous, condition of affairs.
For the public it will now probably suffice if they insist on raising the question of quantity whenever they suffer in any way. If they are unable to answer the question themselves let them go to a trained physiologist who can do so, and not to a diet quack. But muscular strength, endurance, mental and bodily energy, skin circulation, temperature and blood colour are all things which the public can see for themselves and from which they should in all cases be able to get sufficient warning to save them from the worst forms of disaster.
Some people imagine that they eat very little, when as a matter of fact they have good healthy appetites. Others again think they are eating a great deal, when as a matter of fact they take very little. In both cases a physiological test of the excreta will give accurate information. I once had a medical patient who imagined that he produced great amounts of force and performed feats of endurance on wonderfully small quantities of food. His excreta showed, however, that he was merely under-estimating the food he took. A fat man may seem to be living on very little, but fat does not require to be fed, and his real bone and muscle weight is not large. A thin man may seem to require a large quantity of food, but he is really very heavy in bone and muscle, the tissues that have to be nourished. In all these
It is not necessary to follow the given quantity of grains per pound slavishly and without regard to consequences. It is necessary to see that the required physiological results are obtained.
If a patient says he can live on less than I ordered for him and if he can pass the physiological tests satisfactorily I know that his bone and muscle weight has been over-estimated. On the other hand, if a patient falls below the physiological tests, though taking and digesting the quantities ordered for him, I conclude that his bone and muscle weight has been under-estimated.
In all cases it is possible to obtain the best physiological results and to say when quantities are just right, neither too much nor too little.
The evil effects of too much are not serious; they entail perhaps a little “gout” or some temporary loss of freedom from waste products.
The evil effects of too little, if persevered in and continued, especially if some of these effects are attributed to causes which have no real existence, are deadly and dangerous, for they bring on an insidious deterioration both of function and structure which leads by several avenues, often miscalled “diseases,” to death itself.
M.D.
HEALTHY BRAINS.
Comparatively few health enthusiasts or food reformers realise the necessity for mental, as distinct from bodily, hygiene, yet all real health has its roots in the mind. Moreover, it is only by studying the hygiene of mind that we are enabled to do work in greater quantity and of better quality than we should otherwise be capable of, and to do this without risk of strain on the nerves or injury to health. The articles under this heading put forward some of the elementary laws of mental hygiene.—[Eds.]
Imagination in Use.
To some people any talk about the importance of training the imagination of children through their toys, games and studies seems fantastic and trivial. They compare it to feeding them on sweetmeats; they think it means substituting story books for real life and encouraging the easy exercise of fancy for the careful study of fact.
But imagination is not a mere ornament to a life-work; it is rather one of its most valuable and necessary tools. If it did no more than sweeten and adorn the world, it would be well worth having, well worth making considerable sacrifices to attain. But it does more than this. It bears much fruit as well as flowers; fruit that, if it ripens in suitable weather, endures and can be used for the service of man.
There is a wonderful palm-tree, called the Tal or Palmyra palm, which in India and Ceylon supports six or seven millions of people, and “works” also in West Africa, where it is probably native. It gives its young shoots and unripe seeds as food; its trunk makes a whole boat, or a drum or a walking-stick, according to size; hats, mats, thread and baskets—in fact, almost all kinds of clothing and utensils—are made from the split and plaited leaves; gum comes from it, and certain medicines, jaggery sugar too and an intoxicating drink for those who desire it. In one of the museums at Kew—a wet day brings always something besides disappointment—there is a book made up of the very leaves of the palm, containing a Tamil poem enumerating more than eight hundred human uses to which this marvellous single plant can be put.
Now the imagination is like a Palmyra palm. We stand a long way off and, looking up, say “What a graceful tree! But what a pity it produces that intoxicating ‘toddy’ and nothing else!” Yet all the while food and clothing and shelter and travel and learning are all wrapped up in it, if only we were not too ignorant to guess, or too idle to seek.
We talk as if the poet and painter had need of imagination, but not the student, the doctor, the philanthropist, the business man, whereas none of these can do work at a really human standard without imagination that is living, penetrating, active and yet trained and disciplined.
A recent illuminating address to a body of students pointed out that Germany's immense industrial strides have been made possible by an education which draws men's minds out of narrow old grooves, and helps them to see and grasp wider possibilities. But the same speaker went on to point out that the English worker has far more real initiative and imagination than the German, and that in our own country we have not even to make elaborate plans for developing these qualities, but rather to release them in our administrators so far as to prevent actually checking them in the children now growing up.
Imagination in business, for instance, means new possibilities, fresh sources of supply and fresh markets to demand, economy of working and better adjustment of work to worker, so as to have less waste of our greatest capital, human time and power. America has taught us something in these respects; what we must do is to take what new light she has developed, while keeping our long-grown, well-earned skill which she has not had the chance to make.
In research work, again, we need perpetually the synthetic and constructive imagination if individual work is not to become narrowly specialised and shut off from other divergent or parallel lines which would illuminate it. The other day I was told of a great surgeon who not only has six or seven assistants to help him in his immediate tasks, but also, since he is too busy in the service of humanity to have time for reading, has eight trained assistants whose business it is to read in many languages what is being done all over the civilised world in his own line, and keep him informed as to the development of experience. A wonderful advance on the crystallisation of individual method, this, and yet it needed but the imaginative projection upon scientific work of what every business firm and every political unit has long done.
To transfer to our own concerns a method developed elsewhere is one of the most valuable services imagination can render. Almost all educational reform comes about thus, most mechanical inventions, a great part of economy and comfort in individual homes. Also, besides these particular advantages, the incessant coming and going between the different fields of activity, the circulation of attention which this use of the imagination involves, tends to vitalise and enrich not only the individuals who carry it out, but the whole social organism of which they form part.
Upon the moral side not much need be said. “Put yourself in his place” is a very old and respectable recipe for growing justice in one's conduct, consideration in one's speech, sympathy in one's heart. As employer or magistrate, as teacher or nurse, as customer or shopman, as parent or husband or child we must all deal somehow with our fellow-men: honestly and truthfully, we mean, kindly and helpfully, we hope. But is it not the more or the less of our imagination that makes such dealings possible? Without it, we are cruel because of something we do not feel, unjust because there is something we do not know, unwittingly deceitful because there is something we do not understand. With it, our justice will support, our kindness uplift, our attempt at help will not be barren, but will awake response and raise the whole level of our human intercourse into a region of higher possibilities.
E.M. Cobham.
FUTURIST GARDENING.
To-Morrow's Flowers.
Now we see the flowers in blossom in the vineyards of our friend Naboth and we know which we should most like in our own garden. There is an exquisite joy in begging or stealing a few seeds and bringing them home to blossom for us as they did for Naboth. I carry at this time a few small envelopes bought for a few pence a hundred at Straker's, and whenever I see something nice in seed I bag it. In another week it would drop beneath the plant it grew on and, not being cared for by a gardener, would be smothered or hoed up. In a nice little seed-bed all to itself it can unfold all manner of pleasure for its abductor.
Plant your flower seeds on a nice ripe, rich bed—that is, one compounded of old and even half-used manure. Keep the seedlings watered as they grow and by judicious pricking-out give them the room they need. About October you can plant the best of them in the place where you want a good bush next year, and, if it is a perennial, you have for many years to come a beautiful plant with a personal history. Even if you have bought your penn'orth of seed there may be a pleasant anecdote connected with it. My garden is at present amazingly blue with Dropmore Alkanet (Anchusa). Three years ago I bought three seeds for a penny. Two of them came up. I slashed up the plants and now I have half-a-dozen clumps as well as a similar number left in the old garden whence I have removed.
If you asked me what kinds of seed in particular you ought to plant for perennial flowers just now, I might want many more pages to tell you in. Let me give you a very short list of those that most appeal to me on the spur of the moment. It will be enough to go on with:—
- Trollius (globe flower).
- Helianthemum (rock rose).
- Epilobium (willow herb).
- Hollyhock.
- Echinops (globe thistle).
- Anchusa Italica, Dropmore variety.
- Lupine.
- Tritoma (red-hot poker).
- Heuchera (coral-root).
- Yarrow.
- Lychnis (garden campion).
- Inula (Elecampane).
- Funkia (Plaintain lily).
- Eremurus.
This list is representative because it includes some species, such as Eremurus, Trollius and Tritoma, that are not usually grown from seed by the amateur. To raise these rather expensive monsters from pennyworths of seed is a floral adventure which brings its own abundant reward.
I should be very proud of a garden that consisted entirely of plants that I had raised from seed. It might be one that had never had anything else in or the seedlings might gradually oust the bulbs and corms and grown plants with which the garden began. There would be many things there intrinsically as well as extrinsically valuable. Carnation seed, for example, is constantly producing new varieties, and to grow rose seedlings is even to court fortune. It is a long time before you see your rose. The seed takes sometimes two years to germinate, and then you have to wait a year or two before you get a typical blossom. The growers hurry matters by cutting a very tiny bud from the first sprout and splicing that on to an older stock. One of the advantages of having your roses grown from seed and on their own stocks would be that they could not produce wild suckers.
I have just seen a wonderful grove of Aquilegias, the glorified columbine which has the centre of one colour and the outside petals of another—sulphur with mauve or yellow with pink, and many other varieties. The nucleus was grown from shop seed and the rest from the seed of the first-comers. The only thing to choose between them is that the new ones have produced a least one variety not represented in the first batch. You may be sure that I am going to get some seed from here and raise some Aquilegias for myself. Good reader, go thou and do likewise.
G.G. Desmond.
MIDSUMMER MADNESS.
We had come, “3.7” and I, to the Boundary, a white, unpaved road which winds across the full width of Wimbledon Common, from the old Roman camp to the windmill. Simultaneously we cried a halt, I because I never cross that road without some hesitation, he because he wanted to get out of the folding go-cart in which he had been riding and turn it, with the aid of a small piece of string and a big piece of imagination, into a 40-horse-power motor car.
On the map the road is not called the Boundary. If you want to know why I call it so I can only say that once you have crossed it things are different; I do not mean a difference merely of country or scenery, but a difference of atmosphere; better, and more literally, a change of spirit. To put it bluntly, I never knew the reality of fairyland until I blundered across that road one grey gusty evening ten years ago, and heard the tall grasses whistling in the wind. Since then the road has always been a frontier, not to be crossed without preparation.
As “3.7” tumbled out of his go-cart I looked at my watch and saw it lacked but a few minutes to noon. It was just such a cloudless June day as must have inspired Shelley's Hymn of Apollo. No smallest cloud to break the dazzling blue; and, high above our heads, Apollo, standing “at noon upon the peak of heaven.”
If it had been Midsummer Day I should have thought twice about crossing the Boundary. As it was, we were quite near enough to the 24th of June to make it risky. So, as “3.7” bent a tangled head over the bonnet of his Daimler, I flung myself down on the level turf beside him and stared across the road.
Behind us and on either side were clumps of gorse bushes, and beyond them the immense level expanse of the open heath. Immediately in front was the road, sunk a foot beneath the turf, which comes right up to it, both on this side and that.
“Another piece of string, please,” said “3.7,” rummaging in my pockets without waiting for an answer, “and a pencil, and——”
And then I saw it. On the farther side of the road there is a stretch of short turf, some hundred yards wide; and beyond that an irregular line of silver birches; and beyond that the blue of distant hills, for the Common slopes down where the trees begin. Between the silvery wood and the road, through the midst of the wide belt of turf, and parallel with the Boundary, ran a river. There was nothing to be much surprised at, for it was just the kind of river you would expect to see running through the fields of fairyland. It was a river of grass.
It was the slender-stalked, tufted, not very tall, grey-headed grass that grows quite generally in open country and wild places. But the wind and the sun now turned it into a river which ran fast between its banks of green, its waves silvery grey, quick-flowing waves, gleaming and dappled, an endless succession. It flowed from somewhere out of sight in the west, and disappeared to the east over the edge of the great slope that brings you down to the woods, vanishing, to all intents and purposes, over the edge of the world.
Without taking my eyes off this
I cannot be certain, but it is my considered opinion that Apollo stopped his golden chariot for the space of a whole minute to look down at the golden-haired boy wading in that noiseless, fast-flowing river.
In another minute “3.7” was back at my side, both hands full of the tufted grass he had pulled. I regret to say he tickled my ear with it.
Honest, solemn reader, ardent food reformer, keen educationist, clear-headed moralist, practical-minded housewife, I tell you frankly there is no moral to this little episode. It throws no light on what to eat, or on the purchasing power of an English shilling, or on the ethical training of young children, or on the nature of neurasthenia. Fairyland, of course, is a childish fiction, Apollo a solar myth, a road is a road, grass is grass and heaven is a state of mind. I quite agree with you. But let me whisper something in your ear. If you should ever blunder across your Boundary, don't be surprised if things look queer on the other side; above all, whatever you do, don't let any strange river you may find flowing there carry you away, or it may bring you, spite of all your protests, through one of the gates of pearl into the City of God.
Edgar J. Saxon.