Jan, 10, 1938—What a weird and wonderful thing a train of thought is....as witness the following. I looked at Mr. Punch's very clever cartoon with the caption "Nuts and May," and this is what I thought. How absurd the words "nuts and May" are, when read into the context of the children's rhyme: if nuts are being gathered there cannot possibly be any May in the hedges: my mind leaps back to an old song of the early nineties which began. "Here we go gathering nuts and May, what a ridiculous thing to say, for how can a fellow go gathering May when there's not any May to gather": so far, so good, but what about our local blossom of this month? I see old Robert Fortune wandering through China in 1844 and taking names (wi! out any knowledge of the Chinese language) just from the sounds which came into his ears: I see the natives bringing him the beautiful yellow blossom, which alone blooms during the month of January—sometimes as early as December—and when they called it "Luh Mei,"
Sines cot Sack 1S the most famous May" he little knew that the two Chinese of England, so he wrote it down, "La—
syllables meant "Winter Blossom"—his mind "was only fixed on the hedgerows of England: later I see Mr. H. T. Wade of "Boat and Gun" fame, quoting Mr. D. MacGregor, one of our pioneer Municipal gardeners, and' seying that the flower of January is "The Lammay, sold in branches with their yellow flowers, and largely used as hair ornaments": my mind boggles at this because I am sure he is mixing up Luh-mei with the "Joss Flower" which he mentions
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.