the wildwood, sapid, penetrating, and delicious. I tasted
the odour of a hundred blossoms and the green shimmering of innumerable
leaves and the sparkle of sifted sunbeams and the breath of highland
breezes and the song of many birds and the murmur of flowing
streams,--all in a wild strawberry.

Do you remember, in THE COMPLEAT ANGLER, a remark which Isaak Walton
quotes from a certain "Doctor Boteler" about strawberries? "Doubtless,"
said that wise old man, "God could have made a better berry, but
doubtless God never did."

Well, the wild strawberry is the one that God made.

I think it would have been pleasant to know a man who could sum up
his reflections upon the important question of berries in such a pithy
saying as that which Walton repeats. His tongue must have been in close
communication with his heart. He must have had a fair sense of that
sprightly humour without which piety itself is often insipid.

I have often tried to find out more about him, and some day I hope I
shall. But up to the present, all that the books have told me of this
obscure sage is that his name was William Butler, and that he was an
eminent physician, sometimes called "the Aesculapius of his age." He was
born at Ipswich, in 1535, and educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge; in the
neighbourhood of which town he appears to have spent the most of his
life, in high repute as a practitioner of physic. He had the honour of
doctoring King James the First after an accident on the hunting field,
and must have proved himself a pleasant old fellow, for the king looked
him up at Cambridge the next year, and spent an hour in his lodgings.
This wise physician also invented a medicinal beverage called "Doctor
Butler's Ale." I do not quite like the sound of it, but perhaps it was
better than its name. This much is sure, at all events: either it was
really a harmless drink, or else the doctor must have confined its use
entirely to his patients; for he lived to the ripe age of eighty-three
years.

Between the time when William Butler first needed the services of a
physician, in 1535, and the time when he last prescribed for a patient,
in 1618, there was plenty of trouble in England. Bloody Queen Mary sat
on the throne; and there were all kinds of quarrels about religion and
politics; and Catholics and Protestants were killing one another in
the name of God. After that the red-haired Elizabeth, called the Virgin
Queen, wore the crown, and waged triumphant