aloud in a voice so sweet and clear that he had been nearly
crazed with pride and delight. Capriciously she had driven him away
early with the other guests, but to-morrow he would see her again,
or, perhaps, he could get through her door again to-night--to-night--

His feverish reverie was broken in upon by the frightened and
apologetic porter, bringing a letter which his mistress had told him
to deliver as soon as the master came home. Propertius dismissed him
angrily, and held the letter in an unwilling and shaking hand.
Perhaps he would not have read it at all if it had been written on
an ordinary wax tablet. But the little parchment roll had an unusual
and insistent look about it, and he finally unrolled it and, holding
it out as steadily as he could under the small wick of his lamp, read
what was written:--

"P. Virgilius Maro to his Propertius, greeting.
I hope you will allow me to congratulate you on your recent volume
of verse. Your management of the elegiac metre, which my friend
Gallus, before his tragic death, taught me to understand, seems to
me ennobling and enriching, and in both the fire and the pathos of
many of your lines I recognise the true poet. Perhaps you will
recognise the rustic in me when I add that I also welcomed a note
of love for your Umbrian groves of beeches and pines and for
water-meadows which you must have seen, perhaps by the banks of your
Clitumnus, filled with white lilies and scarlet poppies. Most of all
have I been moved by the candour of your idealism. It is rare indeed
in this age to hear any scorn of the golden streams of Pactolus and
the jewels of the Red Sea, of pictured tapestries and thresholds of
Arabian onyx. The knowledge that things like these are as nothing
to you, compared with love, stirs me to gratitude.

"It was in these ways that I was thinking of you yesterday, when I
put my own work aside and walked by the shore of the great bay here,
looking toward Capri. And will you let a man who has lived nearly
a quarter of a century longer than you have add that I wondered also
whether before long you will not seek another mistress for your
worship, one whose service shall transcend not only riches but all
personal passions?

"Like you, I have lain by the Tiber, and watched the skiffs hurrying
by, and the slow barges towed along the yellow waves. And my thoughts
also have been of the meanness of wealth and of the glory of love.
But it was to Rome herself that I made my