s customary only for the gentlemen." In
Scotland presents are reciprocally made on the day.

Gay has given a poetical description of some rural ceremonies used in the
morning:

"Last Valentine, the day when birds of kind
Their paramours with mutual chirpings find,
I early rose, just at the break of day,
Before the sun had chased the stars away;
A-field I went amid the morning dew,
To milk my kine (for so should house-wives do).
The first I spied, and the first swain we see,
In spite of Fortune shall our true love be."

The following curious practice on Valentine's day or eve is mentioned in
the "Connoisseur." "Last Friday was Valentine's day, and the night
before I got five bay leaves, and pinned four of them to the corners of
my pillow, and the fifth in the middle; and then if I dreamt of my
sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But
to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk and
filled it with salt; and when I went to bed, eat it shell and all,
without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote the names of our
lovers upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay and put them into
water, and the first that rose up was to be our Valentine."

The popular tradition, that the birds select mates on this day, is the
last subject to be mentioned. Shakespeare alludes to it in the
"Midsummer Night's Dream."

"St. Valentine is past;
Begin these wood birds but to couple now."

Cowper's "Fable," who cannot call to mind? and its moral may close our
notice of St. Valentine's day.

"Misses, the tale that I relate,
This lesson seems to carry--
Choose not alone a proper mate,
But proper time to marry?"

The list of pageantries and festivals must now close, with an attempt to
chronicle the glories of a modern "chairing day;" and the more imperative
does it seem to find a place in history for this last stray sunbeam of
mediaeval splendour, that it bids fair, amidst the growth of sobriety in
this utilitarian age, to share all, too soon, the fate of its ancestors,
who found their grave in the first "dissolution" and after-flood of
Puritanism. There may be who would liken this relic of pageantry to a
lingering mote of feudalism, that the penetrating broom of reform had
done well to sweep from the pathway of a "free and enlightened people;"
who would hint that the old custom is more honoured in the breach