neighbours on the sea-coast were rejoicing in vegetables of all kinds, we of the ultramontane districts sometimes paid sixteen shillings the bag for potatoes so diminutive that at home they would have been picked out to boil for pigs. In one of our rides we came across a poor man who had established a potato ground in a bit of swamp, and who succeeded in securing a good early crop for sale, by ingeniously lighting large fires at night on the windward side of his garden. The experiment was facilitated by the loneliness of the situation, which might have rejoiced the heart of a hermit, but a warming apparatus of this kind could not of course become one of universal application.
We were, however, much elated by discovering that the finest kind of prickly-seeded spinach grew spontaneously as a weed in our glebe, and in most of the fields around us, during a few weeks of the winter. Our pleasure at finding the spinach was equalled by the surprise which we felt at the ignorance that prevailed amongst our neighbours respecting its qualities as a vegetable, one only amongst them seeming to be aware of its excellence. Neither, with exception of this enlightened person, did anyone appear to know the name of spinach as an Australian product, and the plant was spoken of with opprobrium as "that horrid double gee." When we asked how it came into the colony we were told that it was a Cape plant, and the riddle of its seemingly unmeaning name was solved to our satisfaction by my husband accidentally reading of a Dutch coin called Dubbeltje,[1] having an edge so very sharply indented that
- ↑ On referring to a Dutch dictionary we found Dubbeltje given as an old word for a twopenny-piece, the modern name of which is Dubbelde stuyver.
