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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II MAIZE AND MILLET It has fallen to my lot more than once to be told by Americans ' You have no corn in England.' At first I felt somewhat insulted by this assertion?especially as we were at the time journeying by rail through a part of the country where the yellow corn, in the ear and in the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II MAIZE AND MILLET It has fallen to my lot more than once to be told by Americans ' You have no corn in England.' At first I felt somewhat insulted by this assertion?especially as we were at the time journeying by rail through a part of the country where the yellow corn, in the ear and in the sheaf, gladdened the eye and made one rejoice in a plentiful harvest. But, of course, according to American notions, we have no corn in England, for they confine the term corn to the one cereal maize, which is believed to have been indigenous in America, and unknown to Europe before the time of Columbus. The Americans are, undoubtedly, wrong in limiting the term corn to maize, because long before the discovery of America corn was the generic term for wheat, barley, oats, and rye, and maize received its name of Indian corn from the first European settlers in America, who found it growing there, and in use by the natives as the only bread-stuff. We all know Longfellow's charming description of the birth of this beautiful plant in 'The Song of Hiawatha.' After the hero had buried Mondamin, who was the maize personified? Day by day did Hiawatha Go to wait and watch beside it, Kept the dark mould soft above it, Kept it clean from weeds and insects Drove away with scoffs and shoutings, Kahgahgee, the king of ravens; Till at length a small green feather From the earth shot slowly upward. Then another and another, And before the summer ended Stood the maize in all its beauty, With its shining robes about it, And its long, soft, yellow tresses. And in rapture Hiawatha Cried aloud, ' It is Mondamin Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin ' Then he called to old Nokomis, And lagoo the great boaster; Showed them where the maize was growing;...