llusions of authors, lexicon in hand?
My dear sir, it is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money
for that which one can get done much better and at a much smaller
expenditure by another hand."

From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and took down
my favorite copy of the "Decameron" and thumbed it over very tenderly;
for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little
volume. I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed
since Yseult Hardynge and I parted. She was such a creature as the
great novelist himself would have chosen for a heroine; she had the
beauty and the wit of those Florentine ladies who flourished in the
fourteenth century, and whose graces of body and mind have been
immortalized by Boccaccio. Her eyes, as I particularly recall, were
specially fine, reflecting from their dark depths every expression of
her varying moods.

Why I called her Fiammetta I cannot say, for I do not remember; perhaps
from a boyish fancy, merely. At that time Boccaccio and I were famous
friends; we were together constantly, and his companionship had such an
influence upon me that for the nonce I lived and walked and had my
being in that distant, romantic period when all men were gallants and
all women were grandes dames and all birds were nightingales.

I bought myself an old Florentine sword at Noseda's in the Strand and
hung it on the wall in my modest apartments; under it I placed
Boccaccio's portrait and Fiammetta's, and I was wont to drink toasts to
these beloved counterfeit presentments in flagons (mind you, genuine
antique flagons) of Italian wine. Twice I took Fiammetta boating upon
the Thames and once to view the Lord Mayor's pageant; her mother was
with us on both occasions, but she might as well have been at the
bottom of the sea, for she was a stupid old soul, wholly incapable of
sharing or appreciating the poetic enthusiasms of romantic youth.

Had Fiammetta been a book--ah, unfortunate lady!--had she but been a
book she might still be mine, for me to care for lovingly and to hide
from profane eyes and to attire in crushed levant and gold and to
cherish as a best-beloved companion in mine age! Had she been a book
she could not have been guilty of the folly of wedding with a yeoman of
Lincolnshire--ah me, what rude awakenings too often dispel the pleasing
dreams of youth!

When I revisited England in the sixties, I was tempted to make an
excursion into