the honest Esau ale. As for streams that spouted inexplicably from solid rocks, these he held to be an infringement of Moses' prerogative. He would unscrew the knob of his footman's cane for a morsel of Parmesan cheese and chew the cud of bitter reflection, while with the butt of his nose he would polish the silver ball till it shone with equal splendour.

Betty found him thus occupied and, as he stalked after her in obedience to his summoning, she heard him mutter several times in quick succession, "Wells of Sodom! Waters of Gomorrah! Pillars of Salt!"

Mrs. Courteen as she curtseyed her farewells to the Beau sank to the ground like a deflated balloon. This done she gathered her party into hearing and occupied their outward attention as they walked in the direction of the Crescent with a long and disjointed account of her health.

"Why will you shake your muff so vehemently?" complained the Widow.

"'Tis full of dust," said Phyllida.

If it was, I am afraid Miss Courteen was trying to throw some of it into her mamma's eyes.

Chapter the Third

THE BLUE BOAR

WHILE the Exquisite Mob circled round the central fane of Æsculapius, Mr. Charles Lovely had enough lack of taste and orthodoxy to make a heretick promenade in the low-lying water-meadows at the foot of the town.

He had knocked three times at old General Morton's house in the Western Colonnade and delivered Miss Courteen's Valentine into the hands of Miss Sukey Morton's maid. She, poor soul, wore round her neck a brass button attached to a piece of string still reminiscent in tarred perfume of the Dorsetshire jetty down which she had wandered a year ago. It was streaking her breast with verdigris as if in some way prophetick of a heart that all too soon would be tarnished more irreparably by that faithless lover beyond the seas.

Consequently Miss Morton's maid received the paquet with a sympathetick reverence learnt in long morning dreams when the sunlight splashed the walls of her garret in waves and ripples of faint gold.

"Any name, your honour?" she asked.

"I believe not."

"And no message?" she paused in bright-eyed hope of an assignation which was to be the first step in the softening of her mistress' hard and imperious little heart.

"None at all so far as I know, my dear," and Mr. Lovely passed on down the deserted street towards the meadows.

The little maid stood on the steps regarding him.

"Tes a Valentoine surely," she thought, and held the envelope between her and the discoverer sun. A red heart glowed through the paper, a red heart pierced by a flaming arrow.

"And who'd ha' thought she had a bow and her be so spoitful."

She sighed as she gazed after Mr. Lovely.

"He do look proper and happy surely."

The elegant young gentlemen had, in fact caught some of the harlequin grace of a fine morning in the prime of the year as he avoided the cracks in the paving stones to bring the meadows closer and make the Colonnade less intolerably long.

"Wi' sech a rosy spark, for sure, she've no call to be jealous of me," thought the little maid, as her soul went winging over the great Atlantick whose roar filled the silence of her mind, to meet the soul of her sailor-lover who was at the moment sitting upon an alien beach in the company of two dusky wantons and a bottle of Jamaica rum.

Mr. Lovely turned the corner and the little maid vanished at the sound of a bell summoning her to tie one of her mistress' pink bows to a more modish angle.

Our hero, for since perfect confidence should exist between us, I will no longer attempt to conceal his identity, continued to walk to the tune of a lyrick always provided the measure did not compel him to step upon one of the fatal cracks. Soon he came to a road which ended in green fields sodden with winter rains, but soft and grateful after the arid pavement.

Face to face with the pale blue February sky, he took up more earnestly the intention of the half-fledged songs that occupied his brain. Strange songs they were, fanciful and unrestrained in the eyes of their author and his contemporaries who did not recognize in them an echo of one Mr. Herrick, dead, and now forgotten by the world of literature. His mother had read the poems to him as a child. The Hesperides of 1648 was the only book owned by the lodging-house in Westminster where a dingy year of childhood had dragged out its course. In his youth, he had loved their sharp, elusive harmonies, and when he attained years of composition, could never free his own lyricks from extravagance so acquired, however assiduously he attempted to follow Augustan models. To his credit, be it added, he was always sincerely ashamed of his barbarick numbers and, as he grew older, was often successful in expressing the heart of a riotous evening in a clear-cut drinking song. Perhaps this vain pursuit of formalism in words made him neglect his private life, which ran a wild career checked by nothing stronger than the strings of his purse.

As he leaned over a stile and watched the cattle in the meadows, out of the past there came like an arrow of song shot from the gloomy depths of London,

But Mr. Lovely was dissatisfied. He felt the sentiment would have reached a larger dignity, a more epigrammatick crispness, a more trenchant elusiveness, if it had never strayed beyond the bonds of an heroick couplet. He deplored his ineradicable early impressions and vowed to study the classick models with a still more fierce ardour of imitation.

But having formed this resolution, our hero was just as discontented as before. The sun shining into his heart, found no reflection there.

"These d—d late nights are killing me," he complained, ascribing his discontent to fatiguing sessions of play. He bent down to pluck a starry celandine and wasted a few minutes in trying to find out whether he liked butter. The little golden oracle told him he did, but as he was well aware of this fact already, only the flower benefited by an enhanced reputation for infallibility. Nevertheless it was flicked carelessly over the hedge where it lay stalk upwards in the shade like many another prophet before it. To confess the truth at once, Mr. Lovely had only used the butter to deceive himself, for round about his red-heeled shoes were eight golden petals which seem to prove that a more intimate question had been asked, and answered unfavourably if we may judge by the banishment of the flower. To console his wounded susceptibleness, he determined to smoke a pipe and, having made up his mind, found the long clay stem was broken. With a pithy condemnation of things in general, he tried to establish the reason of his depressed spirits. Then he discovered his spirits were not depressed, merely unsettled. Burgundy of course. Hazard without a doubt. Should he try Chalybeate? The d—l! not if he knew it. Should he try Chalybeate? She wore a very engaging swansdown tippet. What a fool he had been to come to these meadows! Should he try Chalybeate? The half-fledged lyrick was strangled: the landskip seemed pretentiously bright in proportion to the wintry air which was still abroad and, to crown all, he felt an extraordinary desire to drink a tankard of ale with Mr. Anthony Clare at the Blue Boar. The latter might know who wore swansdown in the Crescent. With a sigh of relief, he wrung this admission out of himself, shivered and turned his face towards Curtain Wells,