ad it aloud, friend!" cried Mercutio, who always had a word to throw
away.

"I would I could read it at all. I pray, sir, can you read?"

"With ease--if it is not my tailor's score;" and Mercutio took the
parchment, which ran as follows:--

"_Signior Martino, and his wife and daughters; County Ansdmo, and his
beauteous sisters; the lady widow Vitrumo; Signior Placentio, and his
lovely nieces; Mercutio, and his brother Valentine; mine uncle Capulet,
his wife and daughters; my fair niece Rosaline; Livia; Signior Valentio,
and his cousin Tybalt; Lucio, and the lively Helena_."

"A very select company, with the exception of that rogue Mercutio," said
the soldier, laughing. "What does it mean?"

"My master, the Signior Capulet, gives a ball and supper to-night; these
the guests; I am his man Peter, and if you be not one of the house of
Montague, I pray come and crush a cup of wine with us. Rest you merry;"
and the knave, having got his billet deciphered for him, made off.

"One must needs go, being asked by both man and master; but since I am
asked doubly, I 'll not go singly; I 'll bring you with me, Hamlet. It
is a masquerade; I have had wind of it. The flower of the city will be
there--all the high-bosomed roses and low-necked lilies."

Hamlet had seen nothing of society in Verona, properly speaking, and
did not require much urging to assent to Mercutio's proposal, far from
foreseeing that so slight a freak would have a fateful sequence.

It was late in the night when they presented themselves, in mask and
domino, at the Capulet mansion. The music was at its sweetest and the
torches were at their brightest, as the pair entered the dancing-hall.
They had scarcely crossed the threshold when Hamlet's eyes rested upon
a lady clad in a white silk robe, who held to her features, as she moved
through the figure of the dance, a white satin mask, on each side of
which was disclosed so much of the rosy oval of her face as made one
long to look upon the rest. The ornaments this lady wore were pearls;
her fan and slippers, like the robe and mask, were white--nothing but
white. Her eyes shone almost black contrasted with the braids of warm
gold hair that glistened through a misty veil of Venetian stuff, which
floated about her from time to time and enveloped her, as the blossoms
do a tree. Hamlet could think of nothing but the almond-tree that stood
in full bloom in the little _cortile_ near his lodging. She seemed to
him the