3-046-962 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Gathering blackberries, 1872. 'The young ladies who are seen on our front page employed in gathering a hedge-row crop of delicious bramble-fruit have set themselves a pleasant task, in which one would like to join them. It is not by the dusty roadside, but in the verdant recesses of a wood, or along the fenced sides of a meadow, that this rustic employment should be followed in the autumn holiday-time. There is a delightful spice of vagrancy, the freedom of a mildly savage state, and a sense of depending on the unpurchased bounties of Nature, in the act of picking and eating blackberries, as they are not the produce of cultivation or due to a regular harvest. It reminds one of these damsels, a romantic lass, of "the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago!" and the sound of her voice in song is heard across the field. The good little girl, to whom her elder sisters have intrusted their light basket, is permitted to eat as much as she likes of this wholesome dainty. But their housekeeper and cook will know what use to make of the remainder when they have carried it home. A blackberry-tart, with Devonshire cream, is about the nicest thing you shall ever see upon the table'. From "Illustrated London News", 1872.