r them well from the teaching of the
doctor of Feltre. They were that portion in which a great hero in the
fight, or ever he goes forth to battle, takes leave of his wife and
little son; and to me and Ann it seemed so fine and withal so touching,
that we could well understand how it should be that Petrarca wrote that
no more than to behold a book of Homer made him glad, and that he longed
above all things to clasp that great man in his arms.

Indeed, the poems and writings of Petrarca yielded us greater delights
than all the Greek and Roman heathen. Master Ulsenius had before now
lent them to Ann, and she like a bee from a flower would daily suck
a drop of honey from their store. Yet was there one testimony of
Petrarca's--who was, for sure, of all lovers the truest--which she loved
above all else. In the dreadful time of the Black Death which came as a
scourge on all the world, and chiefly on Italy, in the past century, the
lady to whom he had vowed the deepest and purest devotion, appeared
to him in a dream one fair spring morning as an angel of Heaven. And
whereas he inquired of her whether she were in life, she answered him
in these words: "See that thou know me; for I am she who led thee out
of the path of common men, inasmuch as thy young heart clung to me." And
lo! on that very sixth of April, which brought him that vision, one and
twenty years after that he had first beheld her, Laura had made a pious
end.

With beseeching eyes Ann would repeat to her best beloved, as they sat
together in the oriel bay, how that Laura had led her Petrarca from the
ways of common men; and it went to my heart to hear her entreat him,
with timid and yet fond and heartfelt prayer, to grant to her to be his
Laura and to guide him far from the beaten path, forasmuch as it was
narrow and low for his winged spirit. And while she thus spoke her great
eyes had a marvellous clear and glorious light, and when I looked in her
face wrapped in the veil of her mourning for her father, my spirit
grew solemn, as though I were in church. Herdegen must have felt this
likewise, methinks, for he would bend the knee before her and hide his
face in her lap, and kiss her hands again and again.

But these solemn hours were few.

First and last it was a happy fellowship, free and gay, though mingled
with earnest, that held us together; and when Ann's father had been
some few weeks dead our old gleefulness came back to us again, and then,
after gazing a