"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.