youth engaged in this amiable act of duty was said to go a-mothering, and thence the day itself came to be called Mothering Sunday. One can readily imagine how, after a stripling or maiden had gone to service, or launched in independent housekeeping, the old bonds of filial love would be brightened by this pleasant annual visit, signalized, as custom demanded it should be, by the excitement attending some novel and perhaps surprising gift. There was also a cheering and peculiar festivity appropriate to the day, the prominent dish being furmety - which we have to interpret as wheat grains boiled in sweet milk, sugared and spiced. In the northern part of England, and in Scotland, there seems to have been a greater leaning to steeped pease fried in butter, with pepper and salt. Pancakes so composed passed by the name of carlings; and so conspicuous was this article, that from it Carling Sunday became a local name for the day. 'Tid, Mid, and Misera, Carling, Palm, Pase-egg day,' remains in the north of England as an enumeration of the Sundays of Lent, the first three terms probably taken from words in obsolete services for the respective days, and the fourth being the name of Mid-Lent Sunday from the cakes by which it was distinguished." Another delicacy much esteemed on "Mothering Sunday" was a simnel cake. Walsh, in Curiosities of Popular Customs, says of this dainty: "In Shropshire, Yorkshire and Herefordshire it has long been the custom to make during Lent a cake called a simnel, which is deemed especially appropriate as a 'mothering' present. As far back as Herrick we find TO DIANEME. A ceremonie in Glocester. Half that blessing thou'lt give me. "The inside of a simnel cake was like a rich fruitcake, but it had an outer crust made of flour and water. Boiled first in water, it was subsequently baked. The crust is colored yellow with saffron and ornamented with more or less art. Professional etymologists refer the word simnel to the Latin simila, meaning the finest sort of flour. But folk-etymology declares that the baker-father of Lambert Simnel, pretender to the throne in the reign of Henry VII, was the first to make these cakes, thence called after his own name." It is a far cry from these quaint English observances of Mid-Lent to our new American festival. We cannot claim for Mothers' Day an unbroken line of descent from the old holiday when English apprentices went "a-mothering." This latest festival of ours is perhaps the most conscious and deliberate effort a nation ever made publicly to honor motherhood and all that it implies. If the swiftly growing popularity of Mothers' Day shall help to restrain the present tendency towards filial disrespect its emblem, the white carnation, will come to be reverenced as one of the most precious of our national flowers. R. H. S. NOTE The Editor, Compiler and Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to The Century Company, Clark Austin & Company, T. Y. Crowell & Company, Dodd, Mead & Company, E. P. Dutton & Company, Funk & Wagnalls Company, Houghton Mifflin Company, Harper & Brothers, Little Brown & Company, Jarrold & Sons, The Macmillan Company, A. C. McClurg & Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, World's Best Poetry, and others who have very kindly granted permission to reprint selections from works bearing their copyright. |