Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 March 1905 — THE ELDER TREE. [ARTICLE]

THE ELDER TREE.

In Days I.onjc Gone by It Was Held In Disrepute. In olden days to be crowned with elder was a disgrace. - In an old play we read, “Laurel for a garland and elder for disgrace.” This may have been due to the story which Shakespeare has noticed that Judas hanged himself upon an elder tree: Well follow’d; Judas was hanged on an elder.—“ Love's Labour's Lost.” Thi£ legend was generally accepted. Ben Jonson in “Every Man Out of His Humour” has, “He shall be your Judas, and you shall be his elder tree to hang on,” and Nixon in his “Strange Footsteps,” “Our gardens will prosper the better when they have in them not one of those elders whereupon so many covetous Judases hang themselves.” Shakespeare also makes it an emblem of grief: Grow patience And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine His perishing root with the increasing vine.—“Cymbeline.” , Telegraph.