Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/56

40 crown and vane, with the royal arms richly gilded. It had been set up again immediately after the Restoration. Great ceremonies attended its erection: twelve picked seamen superintending the tackle, and ancient people clapping their hands and exclaiming, "Golden days begin to appear!" Nelly must have remembered the erection of the Maypole at the bottom of the lane in which she was born; but there is little save some gable-ends and old timber-fronts near her "lodgings-door" to assist in carrying the mind back to the days of the Maypole and the merry monarch whose recall it was designed to commemorate.

Among the many little domestic incidents perpetuated by Pepys, there are few to which I would sooner have been a witness than the picture he has left us of Nelly standing at her door watching the milkmaids on May-day. The Clerk of the Acts on his way from Seething Lane in the City, met, he tells us, "many milkmaids with garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddle before them," and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings-door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice looking upon one. "She seemed," he adds, "a mighty pretty creature." This was in 1667, while her recent triumphs on the stage were still fresh at Court, and