ckoo-spit, because almost every
flower stem has deposited upon it a frothy patch not unlike human
saliva, in which is enveloped a pale green insect. Few north-country
children will gather these flowers, believing that it is unlucky to do
so, adding that the cuckoo has spit upon it when flying over. [1]

The fruits of the mallow are popularly termed by children cheeses, in
allusion to which Clare writes:--

"The sitting down when school was o'er,
Upon the threshold of the door,
Picking from mallows, sport to please,
The crumpled seed we call a cheese."

A Buckinghamshire name with children for the deadly nightshade (_Atropa
belladonna_) is the naughty-man's cherry, an illustration of which we
may quote from Curtis's "Flora Londinensis":--"On Keep Hill, near High
Wycombe, where we observed it, there chanced to be a little boy. I asked
him if he knew the plant. He answered 'Yes; it was naughty-man's
cherries.'" In the North of England the broad-dock (_Rumex
obtusifolius_), when in seed, is known by children as curly-cows, who
milk it by drawing the stalks through their fingers. Again, in the same
locality, children speaking of the dead-man's thumb, one of the popular
names of the _Orchis mascula_, tell one another with mysterious awe that
the root was once the thumb of some unburied murderer. In one of the
"Roxburghe Ballads" the phrase is referred to:--

"Then round the meadows did she walke,
Catching each flower by the stalke,
Suche as within the meadows grew,
As dead-man's thumbs and harebell blue."

It is to this plant that Shakespeare doubtless alludes in "Hamlet" (Act
iv. sc. 7), where:--

"Long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead-men's fingers call them."

In the south of Scotland, the name "doudle," says Jamieson, is applied
to the root of the common reed-grass (_Phragmites communis_), which is
found, partially decayed, in morasses, and of "which the children in the
south of Scotland make a sort of musical instrument, similar to the
oaten pipes of the ancients." In Yorkshire, the water-scrophularia
(_Scrophularia aquatica_), is in children's language known as
"fiddle-wood," so called because the stems are by children stripped of
their leaves, and scraped across each other fiddler-fashion, when they
produce a squeaking sound. This juvenile music is the source of infinite
amusement among children, and is carried on