IN MAIDEN MEDITATION It was afternoon, about five o'clock.

The fine September weather, hot and cloudless, lasted still.

The air was heavy with garden scents, the aromatic sweetness of sun-baked gorse and pine-scrub on the warren, and with the reek off the mud-flats of the Haven, the tide being low.

Upon the sandy skirts of the Bar, across the river just opposite, three cormorants--glossy black against the yellow--postured in extravagant angular attitudes drying their wings.

Above the rim of the silver-blue sea--patched with purple stains in the middle distance--webs of steamer smoke lay along the southern sky.