for the story of my First Love has come. But first, notice the waitress. I confess, whether beautiful or plain,—not too plain,—women who earn their own living have a peculiar attraction for me. 

 I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess. As old Campion sings,— 

   "I care not for those ladies Who must be wooed and prayed; Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country-maid." 

 

 Town-maids too of the same pattern. Whether in town or country, give me the girls that work.  The Girls That Work! But evidently it is high time woe began a new chapter. 

 

 

 CHAPTER IX 

 THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID 

 Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven—in the heaven of my imagination, at all events—she was, of course, a goddess. How she managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed to see it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were any ordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy trying to flirt with her without a touch of reverence. 

 Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morning when even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the young day when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through the noon, are for a short magical hour their own celestial selves, their unearthly glory as yet unhidden by any earthly disguise. 

 Neither fairies nor fauns, dryads nor nymphs of the forest pools, have really passed away from the world. You have only to get up early enough to meet them in the meadows. They rarely venture abroad after six. All day long they hide in uncouth enchanted forms. They change maybe to a field of turnips, and I have seen a farmer priding himself on a flock of sheep that I knew were really a most merry company of dryads and 

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