Now Sheila and Lavender, in their mutual musical confidences, had at an early period discovered that each of them knew something of the older English duets, and forthwith they tried a few of them, to Mackenzie's extreme delight. Here, at last, was a sort of music he could understand--none of your moanings of widows and cries of luckless girls to the sea, but good common-sense songs, in which the lads kissed the lasses with a will, and had a good drink afterward, and a dance on the green on their homeward way. There was fun in those happy Mayfields, and good health and briskness in the ale-house choruses, and throughout them all a prevailing cheerfulness and contentment with the conditions of life certain to recommend itself to the contemplative mind. Mackenzie never tired of hearing those simple ditties. He grew confidential with the young man, and told him that those fine, common-sense songs recalled pleasant scenes to him. He himself knew something of English village life. When he had been up to see the Great Exhibition he had gone to visit a friend living in Brighton, and he had surveyed the country with an observant eye. He had remarked several village-greens, with the May-poles standing here and there in front of the cottages, emblazoned with beautiful banners. He had, it is true, fancied that the May-pole should be in the centre of the green; but the manner in which the waves of population swept here and there, swallowing up open spaces and so forth, would account to a philosophical person for the fact that the May-poles were now close to the village-shops.