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Updated: June 13, 2025
This very May-day afternoon on which our story opens, as Lieutenant McLean and Miss Bayard started forth on their stroll, Miss Forrest, with a shawl hugged woman-fashion around her shapely form, was taking a constitutional up and down the upper gallery.
Nay, I shall be unfit even for a May-day holiday-time; for these minuets, rigadoons, and French dances, that I have been practising, will make me but ill company for my milk-maid companions that are to be. To be sure I had better, as things stand, have learned to wash and scour, and brew and bake, and such like.
The Beltane fires appear to have been kindled also in Ireland, for Cormac, "or somebody in his name, says that belltaine, May-day, was so called from the 'lucky fire, or the 'two fires, which the druids of Erin used to make on that day with great incantations; and cattle, he adds, used to be brought to those fires, or to be driven between them, as a safeguard against the diseases of the year."
I there did acquaint them of my knowledge of that disease, which I believe will be told my Lord Treasurer. Thence to Westminster; in the way meeting many milk-maids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them; "In London thirty years ago, When pretty milkmaids went about, It was a goodly sight to see Their May-day pageant all drawn out.
Steaming across Manila Bay from Cavite to the city on an energetic ferry-boat, scanning the wrecks of the Spanish fleet still visible where the fated ships went down, one of them bearing on a strip of canvas the legible words "Remember the 'Maine," the talk being of Dewey's great May-day, we were passing the famous flag-ship of the squadron that was ordered to destroy another squadron, and did it, incidentally gathering in hand the keys of an empire in the Indies for America, because the American victor was an extraordinary man, who saw the immensity of the opportunity and improved it to the utmost, some one said: "There is the Admiral now, on the quarter-deck under the awning the man in white, sitting alone!"
"Of course he came the moment he knew." And after a moment of half-smiling meditation he pursued: "It was one May-day, and there was some sun; and there was a smell of spring in the air which we felt even in that dirty place. Ah, how I remember me of it all!
The morning of the May-day festival dawned bright and joyous; nature seemed to be smiling, and the "rosy-bosomed hours" began their flight toward the west, with that brilliant splendor which they always deck themselves in, in the merry month of May. Jacques rose early, and was at his mirror betimes.
A tawdry pageant by a lot of clumsy country bumpkins at Whitsuntide or Pentecost, or a silly school-boy masque at Christmas, with the master scolding like a heathen Turk. It was not fair. And now he'd have to work all May-day. May-day out of all the year!
To write verses for May-day seems to have been as much a matter of course as to ride out with the cavalcade that went to gather hawthorn. The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and the courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as in a literary carnival.
Another May-day custom is that of the choristers assembling at five o'clock in the morning on the top of the beautiful tower of Magdalen College, Oxford, and ushering in the day with singing. At the same time boys of the city armed with tin trumpets, called "May-horns," assemble beneath the tower, and contribute more sound than harmony to the celebration.
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