Explore "The Believing Years" by Edmund Lester Pearson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You took rose-leaves -- fresh rose-leaves -- and mixed them with brown sugar. Then you wrapped them in a leaf from a grape-vine, and buried the whole business in the ground. You let them stay for three days. At the end of that time you dug them up and ate them; ate them with rapture known only to those who have eaten this particular delicacy. For to the natural fragrance of the rose-leaves and the nourishing and delicious properties of brown sugar, that interval of three days in the warm earth had added a new quality. A mysterious alchemy had been at work and transformed the mixture into something exquisite -- a dish to be envied by great kings and sultans. It had about it odors of the East; savors of Araby the blest.
So said Ed Mason's older brother, Billy. And he was nearly thirteen. He did not use all the words which I have used to describe the taste of the rose-leaf compound. He had merely said it was "bully. " That was enough for us -- that, and the charm of the operation itself. He had tried it many times in the far-off days of his youth; and now we set out to make some for ourselves.