9* s. XIL AUG. is, 19030 NOTES AND QUERIES.
133
pay expenses. As a mere means of loco-
motion, however, steamboats must fail as
against road or rail, on account of the un-
certain hours of arrival caused by tides, and
the longer time taken even when the tide is
favourable. Only at holiday periods are the
people now willing to travel by steamboat on
the Thames cheap fares, and greater speed
by road and rail, having attracted and
absorbed the business traffic.
ADRIAN WHEELER.
I have seen similar foolish things quoted from the Quarterly Revieiv, and would there- fore advise your correspondent to search in that quarter and consult the index volume. Hansard's ' Parliamentary Debates ; will also yield some choice specimens of prophecies as to the havoc which was to be wrought by railways. L. L. K.
One of the articles referred to against rail- ways is in the Quarterly (see p. 199, chap. x. of Stephenson's life, in vol. iii. of Smiles's
- Lives of the Engineers,' John Murray, 1862).
The article in the Quarterly Revieiv is called ' Canals and Railroads,' vol. xxi. No. Ixii.
R. B. B.
APPLE - BLOSSOMS (9 th S. xi. 506). The custom referred to by MR. YARDLEY, of placing apple-blossoms in a coffin with a dead body just before burial, probably had a significa- tion co-ordinate in its origin with that of other and similar debris of the pagan worship of Pomona. But it is equally probable that such a custom nowadays is nothing more than a tribute, in the language of flowers, to the memory of the dead. The Welsh custom may be but by way of a floral tribute to the maidenhood of the departed, after the manner of suspending funeral wreaths and garlands iii churches, for the virgin who is overtaken by death in the flower of her years is beauti- fully typified by the frail apple-blossom, with its promise of fruit cut off, as it often is, by the winter which,
Lingering, chills the lap of May. In the west of England the blooming of an apple-tree after the fruit is ripe is a sure omen of death, whence the couplet :
A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe Is a sure termination to somebody's life.
The fruit as well as the flower of the apple- tree is identified with the life and destinies of young maidenhood. At the martyrdom of St. Dorothea, in the year of our Lord 303, there appeared
"a faire childe clothed in purpure, barefoot, with crispis here, whose clothes were all sprynkled with sterris, berynge in his hande a litill panyer of golde
w* thre roosis and iii appils, and proffered them to
the virgyn Dorothea."
See *A Fifteenth-Century Life of St. Doro- thea,' by W. E. A. Axon, Hon.LL.D., F.R.S.L., in the Antiquary, Feb., 1901, p. 53.
The custom of throwing the peel of an apple over the head, and judging whether single blessedness or the married state awaits the person in the future, is very old, and still known in England. That of decking a corpse with flowers is alluded to in 'A Boulster Lecture' (1640), and quoted in Brand's 'Antiquities': Marry another, before those flowers that stuck his corpse be withered." It may be observed that the connexion between the flower and the fruit of the apple- tree is so close that the apple is really but an enlarged flower stalk. It is, in fact, the stalk of the flower that is eaten. If we delve deeper into the folk-lore of the apple-tree, it will be found, as the Rev. Hilderic Friend, in his admirable work 'Flowers and Flower- lore,' says, that the apple has the widest and most mystical history of all fruits. The blossom of the apple-tree exists only briefly because the stalk has another mission to accomplish, while that of the rose has but one duty, and when its beauty is fled nothing is left but the perfume. For this reason, and because of its intrinsic beauty, some value the apple- blossom more highly than any other flower, not excepting the rose. Other in- stances of decking the remains of the de- parted with sprigs of rosemary, a branch of the evergreen box-tree, and other "gay and gaudy flowers " are given in Brand's ' Popular Antiquities/ under the heading 'Following the Corpse to the Grave.'
J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL. 161, Hammersmith Road.
The old Keltic legends always spoke of the "apple island " as a sort of happy hunting- ground or Valhalla. It has been suggested that the Kelts brought with them when they came to the British Isles a memory of some fertile continental home where apples abounded. Then, later on, the stories of this elysium grew vague, and were transferred to some St. Brandan's Isle to the westward. The occasional glimpses to be obtained about sun- set of the peaks of Man from many parts of Strathclyde and Cumbria, where Welsh litera- ture first arose, and where the legendary Arthur fought his twelve great battles, may have suggested the location of the apple land to the westward beneath the sunset. Pro- bably the apple-blossoms in the coffin have some reference to this "island valley of Avillion." FRED. G. ACKERLEY.
Care of British Vice-Consul, Libau, Russia.
