But the day of all others sacred to these mystic rites was ever the eve of St. Agnes (January 20), when maidens fasted and then watched for a sign. A passage in the office for St. Agnes’s Day in the Sarum Missal may have given rise to this custom: “Hæc est virgo sapiens quam Dominus _vigilantem_ invenit;” and the Gospel is the Parable of the Virgins.[13] Ben Jonson alludes to the custom:— On sweet St. Agnes’ night Please you with the promised sight, Some of husbands, some of lovers, Which an empty dream discovers. And a character in “Cupid’s Whirligig” (1616) says, “I could find in my heart to pray nine times to the moone, and fast three St. Agnes’s Eves, so that I might bee sure to have him to my husband.” Aubrey gives two receipts to the ladies for that eve, which may still be useful. Take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Paternoster, and sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him you shall marry. Again, “you must lie in another country, and knit the left garter about the right-legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone), and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma knit a knot:— This knot I knit, To know the thing, I know not yet, That I may see, The man that shall my husband be, How he goes, and what he wears, And what he does, all days and years. Accordingly in your dream you will see him; if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers;” and he adds a little encouragement to use this device in the following anecdote. “A gentlewoman that I knew, confessed in my hearing that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen. About two or three years after, as she was on Sunday at church (at our Lady’s Church in Sarum), up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit; she cries out presently to her sister, ‘This is the very face of the man that I saw in my dream. Sir William Soame’s lady did the like.’” It is hardly needful to remind readers of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and the story of Madeline,— Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day, On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care, As she had heard old dames full many times declare. Our ancestors made merry in a similar fashion on St. Valentine’s Day. So Herrick, speaking of a bride, says,— She must no more a-maying, Or by rosebuds divine Who’ll be her Valentine.