The following curious practice on Valentine’s day or eve is mentioned in the “Connoisseur.” “Last Friday was Valentine’s day, and the night before I got five bay leaves, and pinned four of them to the corners of my pillow, and the fifth in the middle; and then if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk and filled it with salt; and when I went to bed, eat it shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote the names of our lovers upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay and put them into water, and the first that rose up was to be our Valentine.” The popular tradition, that the birds select mates on this day, is the last subject to be mentioned. Shakespeare alludes to it in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “St. Valentine is past; Begin these wood birds but to couple now.” Cowper’s “Fable,” who cannot call to mind? and its moral may close our notice of St. Valentine’s day. “Misses, the tale that I relate, This lesson seems to carry— Choose not alone a proper mate, But proper time to marry?” The list of pageantries and festivals must now close, with an attempt to chronicle the glories of a modern “chairing day;” and the more imperative does it seem to find a place in history for this last stray sunbeam of mediæval splendour, that it bids fair, amidst the growth of sobriety in this utilitarian age, to share all, too soon, the fate of its ancestors, who found their grave in the first “dissolution” and after-flood of Puritanism. There may be who would liken this relic of pageantry to a lingering mote of feudalism, that the penetrating broom of reform had done well to sweep from the pathway of a “free and enlightened people;” who would hint that the old custom is more honoured in the breach than the observance; and towards their opinion seems to incline that of the chief performers in the modern “_mystery_”—the M.P. himself, whose nerves, proprieties, and objections have unitedly rebelled against submission to these antiquated practices of this antiquated place. It is therefore scarcely what _is_, but what _has been_, that we have to commemorate in our detail.