Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/189

Rh joke, for it was a favourite pastime to order the gardener at a distance to turn a wheel, which, forcing the water through a number of little pipes, played upon the ladies standing by so as to wet them thoroughly from "top to toe."

On another side of the house lay the kitchen or cook's garden, no longer given up entirely to herbs as of yore. Here grew melons, gourds, cucumbers, radishes, parsnips, carrots, turnips, and salad herbs, for these were no longer the food of the "poor commons," but to be found henceforth at the "tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen and the nobility." Hence more care was given to their cultivation. But by far the most important addition to the kitchen garden was the potato, now brought back from the New World for the first time, "thicke, fat and tuberous," some round as a ball, some oval or egg fashion, some longer and others shorter, which "knobbie rootes are fastened into the stalkes with an infinite number of threddie strings." Such was the potato of these days; it was cooked, "either rosted in the embers, or boiled and eaten with oile, vinegar and pepper, or dressed any other way by the hand of some cunning in cookery." The Elizabethan orchard, which "takes away