"
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.
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