17. Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter;
and Gerarde's five kinds are distinguished only by colour--blue, red,
white, purple, and "the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which
maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find no account of this
ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white is my Soror Reginæ; the red must be
the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn
indeed. All of them must have been more common in Gerarde's time than now,
for he goes on to say "Milk-woort is called _Ambarualis flos_. so called
because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or
Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to
walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English
we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and
Milk-woort."

18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too
hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to
nursing mothers was 'more than ordinarily false'; thinking that its rarity
could never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, or in any
degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the
Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as
we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens
with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter
gluttonies with dying and useless ones.

19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the
hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster--nor the chance of watching
one in seed:--The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of
April, and leaves no sign of itself--that _I_ ever found. The botanists
tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic
for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used