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, _Ye have been fresh and green, Ye have been filled with flowers, And ye the walks have been Where maids have spent their hours._ 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, whose houses clustered like a swarm of bees around the sacred hill.