Sweet Mace

"Too soon for sweet mace-a bunch for sweet Mace," said Gil Carr as he bent down amongst the sedges to pick the bright blue scorpion grass, its delicate flowers relieved with yellow, "so she must have forget-me-not. I wonder whether she'll keep some when I'm far away." He stopped and smiled and listened, for the morning concert was beginning two hundred and fifty years ago, at four o'clock in the morning and down in a Sussex valley near the sea.