Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

A most beautiful light sprayer for watering small plants is easily made in the following way : — Take a piece of sheet zinc five or six inches long and four or five inches wide. Cut a piece half an inch wide on each side of the zinc to within an inch of the middle, so making a little band attached to the main piece, and fold this tightly round the spout of the watering-pot ; bend the zinc sprayer upwards in the middle in a way to enable the water from the pot to flow over it in a continuous sheet. Sorrel is a vegetable seldom grown in English gardens, and still seldomer properly dressed by English cooks, and yet it is excellent, either cut up in the white soup called 'Bonne femme,' dressed like Spinach, or puree'd as thin as a thick sauce. With veal, cooked in all ways, it is especially good. When the summer gets on and it is old, it is desirable to add a little Lettuce with it to soften it, as it gets too sour. It is one of those vegetables never quite so good in towns, as it is best freshly picked, and if faded should be revived in water before cooking. The receipts for cooking it in ' Dainty Dishes ' are quite right. For those who keep cows, or who can have plenty of good fresh cream, the following, I think, will be found a really excellent pudding : — APRIL 77 Creme Brftl^e. — Boil one pint of cream for one minute, pour it on the yelks of four very fresh eggs well beaten, then put it again on the fire and let it just come to the boil. Pour it into the dish in which it is to be served, and let it get cold. Strew a thick crust of powdered sugar over it, put it in a slow oven for ten minutes, then brown it with a salamander, and serve it cold. j April 5th. — We started to-day to spend a week in a French country house, sleeping one night on our way at beautiful Chartres, which, as I am not writing a guide- book, I shall not describe. The weather was bitterly cold ; and when we humbly asked at the hotel for some hot water, the answer we got was ' On n'dchauffe plus.' The French submit more meekly than we do to this kind of regulation, which is curious, as they are so much more sensible, as a rule, than we are in most of the details of life. I was interested to see in the small court of the hotel a quantity of most flourishing Hepat- icas. These flowers, Mr. Bright tells us, defeated all his efforts in his Lancashire garden. I have tried them in various aspects, but they make a sorry show with me in Surrey. In this little back-yard they shone in the sunshine, pink and blue, double and single. I suppose the secret is that they do not mind cold, but they want sun. I wonder if anyone is very successful with them in England ? How I remember them, in the days of my youth, pushing through the dead leaves in the little oak woods in the valleys up the country behind Nice, then, as now, * Le pays du Soleil,' but probably long since all changed into villas and gardens instead of woods and fields. A French country house ! How different it all is ! In some ways we manage best, in others they do. This was rather a cosmopolitan than a typically French house, 78 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN