Moth-Mullein. Baring-Gould Sabine

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      Tom Redway, the young plasterer, had been very much struck with Jessie. ‘Plasterer,’ sneered the girl, ‘what is a plasterer?’ She sent him up an oak tree to catch Purple Emperors—gorgeous butterflies that fly high, and hover about the tops of the king of the British sylva.

      So high do these splendid creatures fly that to catch them a ring net must be affixed to a pole forty feet long. But who can manage a net with the dexterity needed—that is, at the end of so long a pole?

      Tom climbed an oak and brandished a pole with a net in vain throughout a day and caught nothing. Then Jessie laughed at him for his pains. He must be a fool not to know that the Purple Emperor loved home-made goose berry wine, and might be enticed from his aërial altitudes by a bowl of that liquor. After this Tom was so joked by his comrades about being ‘sent up a tree’ by Jessie Mullins that he kept away from Darenth Wood and the forester’s daughter, and soon after—it was said out of spite—married a spinster ten years older than himself.

      The next to hover round Jessie was Joseph Ruddle, the carpenter. She sent him in quest of the caterpillars of the rare Cinxia, that were to be found in webs about plantains halfway down the side of the chalk cliffs.

      Joe had fallen in his efforts to carry up a web of the caterpillars and had broken his leg. After that Joseph Ruddle went no more up the lane to the cottage of the forester.

      Sam Underwood was another admirer. He was a young farmer. She encouraged him after a fashion. A match with him would not be a bad one at all. But Jessie trifled with him; she was like a player on musical glasses, who touches one, sets it humming, then another, and keeps a score in vibration at once. Sam did not appreciate this. He thought she carried on a little too much with a young Oxford man, son of Parkinson the brewer, and, in dudgeon, he withdrew.

      There was a fourth, an owner of large strawberry fields, from which he supplied the London market; a sleepy man who took long to make up his mind. She bewildered him with her learned talk about lepidoptera, and became silent when he ought to have spoken, and no touches at last brought any quiver in his heart, or sound out of him.

      There was a fifth, Mr. Parkinson, but Jessie was not sure that he was sincere; a vain and impudent young man.

      And there was a sixth, who would not be shaken off, little Dicky Duck, an active, cheerful fellow with no fixed profession or trade, but always ready in any quarter to make himself useful. He was usually called in to assist the naturalists at night in the wood. He carried the lantern or painted the tree boles. He was not so tall as Jessie.

      It was preposterous of him, a fellow stunted in his growth, to look up to her with matrimonial prospects in his absurd little head. Jessie snubbed him without compunction. But he remained a faithful follower, and held on after Tom Redway, Joseph Ruddle, Sam Underwood, and Benjamin Polson, who owned the strawberry fields had fallen away.

      Everyone liked Dicky Duck; he was always cheerful, obliging, and good-natured; a wonderfully active little fellow, who darted about like a squirrel, and, as already said, was ready to turn his hand to anything. But, though everyone liked Dicky, everyone laughed at him: partly because he was small; partly because he never resented being made fun of, and so was a safe person on whom to whet the wit; partly also because his fresh, cheery face was laughter-provokng, it had a natural comicality about it. He was not bad-looking, there was no deformity about him, but there was an indefinable something about his face which set those who observed it a-laughing. I had a pair of fire-screens once, on which were two heads with gaping mouths, and whoever took up one of these screens was set a-yawning; so everyone who took up and talked to Dicky Duck was set a-laughing. He was not brilliant, he never said a witty thing in his life, and yet he was a good companion, because he excited risibility in those he was with.

      The tall, dignified, handsome Jessie Mullins was ill-pleased that this absurd little whipper-snapper should be her persistent admirer; it offended her self-esteem.

      As yet nothing has been said of the nickname given to Jessie. It was a nickname that could not fail to attach to her, partly from her business, partly from her appearance and colour. She was called the Moth-Mullein, and it cannot be said that she disliked the nickname, for the Moth-Mullein is a stately plant, that stands up and shows itself off. She was not a modest retreating violet, not ordinary as a daisy, not fresh as a buttercup, not sweet as a rose; no, she was a Moth-Mullein, that stood by itself and held its head high.

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