s with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.

Sarah's fingers danced like midgets above a summer stream. Down through
the courses she worked, giving each item its position according to its
length with an accurate eye. Just above the desserts came the list of
vegetables. Carrots and peas, asparagus on toast, the perennial tomatoes
and corn and succotash, lima beans, cabbage--and then--

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of some
divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down went her
head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard rattled a dry
accompaniment to her moist sobs.

For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next
item on the bill of fare was dandelions--dandelions with some kind of
egg--but bother the egg!--dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter
had crowned her his queen of love and future bride--dandelions, the
harbingers of spring, her sorrow's crown of sorrow--reminder of her
happiest days.

Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the Marechal
Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him your
heart be served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes
at a Schulenberg _table d'hote_. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens
dishonoured the sooner would she have sought the lethean herbs of the
good apothecary.

But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a
message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy
courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a
true soldier of fortune, this _dent-de-lion_--this lion's tooth, as the
French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making, wreathed
in my lady's nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes
into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.

By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But,
still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered
the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart
in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back
to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle
and jump like a strike-breaker's motor car.

At 6 o'clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the
typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh,
the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovariou