The letter done and closed, he lit his taper, And sealing, as it were, his other mocks, He stamped a grave device upon the paper, No Cupid toying with his Psyche’s locks, But some stern head of the old Stoic stocks-- Then, fiercely striding through the staring streets, He dropt the bitter missive in a box, Beneath the cakes and tarts, and sugar’d treats, In Mrs. Smelling’s window full of sweets. [Illustration: BROKE BY A FALL OF THE STOCKS.] Soon sped the letter--thanks to modern plans, Our English mails run little in the style Of those great German wild-beast caravans, _Eil_-wagons--tho’ they do not “go like _ile_,”-- But take a good twelve minutes to the mile-- On Monday morning, just at ten o’clock, As Ellen humm’d “The young May Moon” the while, Her ear was startled by that double knock Which thrills the nerves like an electric shock! Her right hand instantly forgot its cunning, And down into the street it dropt, or flung, Right on the hat and wig of Mr. Gunning, The jug that o’er her ten-week stocks had hung; Then down the stairs by twos and threes she sprung, And through the passage like a burglar darted. Alas! how sanguine are the fond and young-- She little thought, when with the coin she parted, She paid a sixpence to be broken-hearted! [Illustration: “WHEN WILL IT REACH LONDON?”] Too dear at any price--had she but paid Nothing and taken discount, it was dear; Yet, worthless as it was, the sweet-lipped maid Oft kissed the letter in her brief career Between the lower and the upper sphere, Where, seated in a study bistre-brown, She tried to pierce a mystery as clear As _that_ I saw once puzzling a young clown-- “Reading Made Easy,” but turned upside down. Yet Ellen, like most Misses in the land, Had sipped sky blue, through certain of her teens, At one of those establishments which stand In highways, byeways, squares, and village greens; ’Twas called “The Grove,”--a name that always means Two poplars stand like sentries at the gate-- Each window had its close Venetian screens And Holland blind, to keep in a cool state The twenty-four Young Ladies of Miss Bate. But when the screens were left unclosed by chance, The blinds not down, as if Miss B. were dead, Each upper window to a passing glance Revealed a little dimity white bed; Each lower one a cropp’d or curly head; And thrice a week, for soul’s and health’s economies, Along the road the twenty four were led, Like coupled hounds, whipped in by two she-dominies With faces rather graver than Melpomene’s.