You needn’t wish to be happier and merrier than those two lovers, as they gaily hastened to that bright and cosy corner of the town where those lovely ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of the passers-by.  O those hams with their honest shining faces, polished like mahogany—­and the man inside so happy all day slicing them with those wonderful long knives (which, of course, the superior class of reader has never seen) worn away to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen as Excalibur.  Beauty used to calculate in her quaint way how much steel was worn away with each pound of ham, and how much therefore went to the sandwich.  And what an artist was the carver!  What a true eye! what a firm, flexible wrist! never a shaving of fat too much—­he was too great an artist for that.  Then there were those dear little cream cheeses, and those little brown jugs of yellow cream come all the way from Devonshire—­you could hear the cows lowing across the rich pasture, and hear the milkmaids singing and the milk whizzing into the pail, as you looked at them.

And then those perfectly lovely sausages—­I beg the reader’s pardon!  I forgot that the very mention of the word smacks of vulgarity.  Yet, all the same, I venture to think that a secret taste for sausages among the upper classes is more widespread than we have any idea of.  I confess that Beauty and her poet were at first ashamed of admitting their vulgar frailty to each other.  They needed to know each other very well first.  Yet there is nothing, when once confessed, that brings two people so close as—­a taste for sausages.

‘You darling!’ exclaimed Beauty, with something like tears in her voice, when her poet first admitted this touch of nature—­and then next moment they were in fits of laughter that a common taste for a very ‘low’ food should bring tears to their eyes!  But such are the vagaries of love—­as you will know, if you know anything about it—­’vulgar,’ no doubt, though only the vulgar would so describe them—­for it is only vulgarity that is always ‘refined.’

Then there was the florist’s to visit.  What beautiful trades some people ply!  To sell flowers is surely like dealing in fairies.  Beautiful must grow the hands that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl’s every thought!

There remained but the wine merchant’s, or, had we not better say at once, the grocer’s, for our lovers could afford no rarer vintages than Tintara or the golden burgundy of Australia; and it is wonderful to think what a sense of festivity one of those portly colonial flagons lent to their little dining-table.  Sometimes, I may confide, when they wanted to feel very dissipated, and were very rich, they would allow themselves a small bottle of Benedictine—­and you should have seen Beauty’s eyes as she luxuriously sipped at her green little liqueur glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the delight of feeling occasionally wicked.  However, these were rare occasions, and this night was not one of them.