Love o’ the ground, All healand True Love, Mothers wort and Queen of the Meadows. As for a salve wherewith to anoint the forehead against visits from “Elf or goblin night visitors,

Country Contentments 
STO LEN goods are sweetest when a title is needed for extracts from the “ Cunynge Curiosities” of 10th- to 18th-century writers; books “wherein, thou o Reader (if thou canst but read) art sure to finde abundance and plenty of matters most dainty.” Gervase Markham, the author of 16th-century Country Contentments, writes, like Sir Hugh Platt in The Garden of Eden, “to the pleasuring of others,” and title thief though I am, I can not feel that kindly Master Markham grudges me my stolen heading. “ I shall not blush to tell you I had some ambition to publish this book” for the “ pleasing” of “ all Gentlemen and Ladies and others delighting in God’s vegetable creatures.” 
“When the greate books at large are not to be had but at greate price,” or after hours of search in ancient libraries, many modern readers must be denied access to the “Truths and Mysteries” early writers deemed all important, and occasionally, as Platt says, “rolled up in the most cloudy and darksome speech” after having“wrung them from the earth by the painfull hand of experience for your good entertainment.” Surely in a world which pessimists insist is being given over to the devil all should hear of a reliable Anglo-Saxon Salve against “Temptations of the Fiend”? A famous politician begged for the inclusion of a “Leechdom against a man full of elfin tricks,” and suggested that certain citizens of the U.S.A. would welcome “A lithe soft drink against a devil and dementedness,” and might not Scotland Yard consider the possibilities of a prescription said to be infallible “If any evil tempting occur to a man” ? Such simple remedies, brewed, pounded or devised from garden herbes— “honest wortes,” mingled with Holy water, prayers, and flowers whose very names bring healing:— Love o’ the ground, All healand True Love, 
Mothers wort and Queen of the Meadows. As for a salve wherewith to anoint the forehead against visits from “Elf or goblin night visitors,” our nurseries still need it, while an ointment inducing Elves to return and restore our lost childish faith in them would be of even greater value to some of us. 2


Miss Rohde in her exquisite Garden of Herbs quotes a 16th-century receipt 

“ To enable one to see the fairies,” 
a charm I never saw written down, 
though one very similar was told me over thirty years ago by an old woman in the West Country.
 As in Miss Rohde’s version,
 Rosewater and Marigold water, herbs and flowers gathered to the East, played their part, but first in importance
           — or perhaps first in my memory— was, thyme and grass from a fairy ring.
 I often wanted to test its magical properties, but never succeeded in waking at dawn. 

According to my informer, dawn, or just before set of full moon, was the correct hour at which to make one’s first bow to the little unseen folk. 

At that time of my life the inner wonder of her beliefs and friendship with the fairies— which none of her neighbours seemed to doubt— was just as it should be, and nothing much out of the ordinary. 

Now, when I could better appreciate it and have no unsympathetic nursemaid to scoff at pleadings to be allowed a hedgehog in bed to keep me awake on important business, the old lady sleeps forever, and the wood where she said the fairies could be found was cut down in 1916. 
To have missed collecting all the details for preparing such a truly content-giving charm still makes me “monstrous melancholy” ; old adjectives, “prodigious,” “vastly,” and their like, express better than modern words the seriousness of such a loss.
 The loss of enjoyment and belief in ancient charms and customs, not to mention courtesies, has spread like a pest amongst country-folk since Trippers “boomswisshed” into their midst, 

Trippers ready to believe that their name denotes: a rider in bangs, a litter distributor, one willing to murder flowers and behead wild rosebuds with paper streamers: not “one who walks nimbly, or dances with light feet.” Motor horns seem to be “The passing bell, also called the soul bell, ” sounding the knell of better days. 
The above paragraph was gently censored by one with a knowledge of “ Gardens and their Godly treasure to be found therein” that ranks him kin to Thomas Hill, who wrote as finale to The Profitable Art of Gardening, “The favour of God be with thee always.”
 At his suggestion I add a quotation from Grose: 4
“ The passing Bell was antiently rung for two purposes, one to bespeak the Prayers of all good Christians for a Soul just departing; the other to drive away evil Spirits who stood at the Bed’s foot, and about the House, ready to seize their prey, or at least to molest and terrify the Soul in its passage: but by the ringing of that Bell (for Durandus informs us Evil Spirits are much afraid of Bells) they were kept aloof and the Soul like a hunted Hare gained the start or what is by Sportsmen called Law.” Even if many of the old Contentments are gone beyond recall, we can, as he says, loudly “ring the funerall peale” over such fiendish customs as the games of “Mumble Sparrow” and “Cat in Bottle”— inflicting intense suffering on helpless animals.
 The charm and sheer word magic of most of the old writers incline one to forget that the Country Contentments of our ancestors generally were balanced by discontentments.


 The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping and early issues of The Tatler and Spectator hint that 17th- and 18th-century Housewives were faced with difficulties similar to the troubles of a Maisonette wife or Flat-wife of to-day. 5

FOREST COLONY

FOREST COLONY
smallest attempt to occupy or colonize the place, demanded their withdrawal on the astonishing grounds that the Pope had allotted to Spain all lands lying west of longitude 60°W. They harried the settlers without ceasing and with varying fortune until, on September 10th, 1798, the guns of H.M. Sloop of War Merlin and the gun-flats improvised by the Baymen of Belize beat off-—or scared off—a formidable armada launched against them by the Captain-general of Yucatan (who rejoiced in the fine old Spanish name of O’Niel), and settled the business, until it was revived in recent years by the Republic of Guatemala.*
LOGWOOD declined in price, but long before this happened the settlers of Honduras had found other valuable products in the forest. First of these to be exploited was mahogany. Swie tenia Mahogani and Swietenia Macro phylla, of that great timber-yielding family the Meliacae, had the good fortune to catch the fancy of the well-to-do public. The Honduras mahogany is a splendid-looking tree, heavily buttressed. It attains a girth of fourteen or fifteen feet above the buttresses and a clear timber height from the top of the buttresses to the first branch of fifty feet or more. Tn tropical mixed forests of the kind in which mahogany grows, nothing of the nature of a pure stand of one species is ever discovered. Mahogany is slightly gregarious and where one tree is found there are usually others
O J    O    J    o O    .    .    ^J
within a relatively short distance. But the winged seeds, somewhat similar to large sycamore seeds, are evidently effective in securing dispersion, and trees are widely scattered throughout the forest. Two hundred mahogany trees to a square mile—less than one to three acres—is good mahogany forest.
Mahogany is a light wood and the obvious way to get it out of the forest is by floating it down a river. Unfortunately, all forest near the rivers has been logged since early days. Until comparatively recently the tree was ruthlessly over-cut, and where too high a proportion of the secd-bearers has been felled, mahogany has failed to regenerate, so that it must now be sought many miles from the natural routes of extraction.
In the old days, trees were felled only within a few hundred feet of the rivers and hauled bodily to the waterside by slaves. Later, cattle were called upon to do the hauling, dragging wooden sledges running over sticks placed at intervals across the path. This technique is still occasionally followed for hauls up to a mile when the first rains have provided lubrication, and is known as “ sliding.’” “ Sliding Camp ” is a name that appears frequently on the map of British Honduras.
THE next development was the introduction of wheeled trucks. These could be employed only in the dry season and so the operations began to conform to the pattern in use today. A five-mile haul is about the limit for cattle which are usually worked at night for the sake of coolness. A thousand logs was a good season’s work whth cattle, and even now “Thousandth Log” day is celebrated in the logging camps with a holiday on which the management is expected to provide rum freely, though the target of the operation, using tractors, may be three, five or seven thousand logs. For nowadays the crawler-track tractor hauls the logs in every big operation and it is only in the smaller ones that cattle are still occasionally used. Apart from everything else, the cattle food has been over-cut and is no longer plentiful; so much labour is required to cut and bring it in that the cost of cattle haulage has greatly increased.
The elite of the modern logging camp are the tractor drivers and the best of them handle their machines with a skill and nerve that 1 find admirable. A payable tractor haul may extend to sixteen miles or so, and we now can say that almost all dry and reasonably level parts of the Colony can be logged, for little of it lies at a greater distance than that
* How the Braye Baymen Saved Belize was told in the EMPIRE YOUTH ANNUAL, 1943.