r well fitted to captivate a lad. I felt, indeed, a certain
tickling at my heart-strings; but the austere thoughts to which I was
accustomed, cured me of that weakness; and without failing in civility,
I kept myself within the bounds of grave indifference.

A Genoese woman, to whom I paid a trifle for ironing my scanty linen,
came one morning with some of my shirts in a basket. Upon the washing
lay a very fine carnation. "Whose is that flower?" I asked. "It is sent
to you," she answered, "and from the hands of a lovely girl, your
neighbour, for whom you have the cruelty to take no heed." The carnation
and the diplomatic message--and well knew I from whence both
came--increased the itching at my heart-strings. Nevertheless, I
answered the ambassadress in terms like these: "Thank that lovely damsel
on my part; but do not fail to tell her that she is wasting her flowers
to little purpose."

My head began to spin round and my heart to soften. At the same time,
when I reflected that I had no wish to enter into matrimonial
engagements, which were wholly excluded from my plan of life, nor yet to
prejudice the reputation of a girl by traffic with her--furthermore,
when I considered how little money I possessed, to be bestowed on one in
whom I recognised so much of beauty--I stamped out all the sparks of
sympathy which drew me toward her. I began by never washing my hands at
the window, in order to escape the arrows of those thievish eyes. This
act of retirement was ineffectual; indeed, it led to worse consequences.

One day I was called to attend upon my old friend, the officer Giovanni
Apergi, who had been my master in military exercises, and who was now
in bed, racked and afflicted with aches acquired in youthful
dissipation. He had his lodging on the walls, not far away from mine, in
the house of a woman well advanced in years, the wife of a notary.
Thither then I went.

The elderly housekeeper began to twit me with my rustic manners.
Gradually she passed to sharp but motherly reproof; in a youngster of
from sixteen to seventeen, like myself, the sobriety of a man of fifty
had all the effect of caricature; in particular, my treatment of
well-bred handsome girls, devotedly in love with me, my driving them to
desperation and tears by indifference and what appeared like scorn, did
not deserve the name of prudence; it was nothing short of clownishness
and tyranny. My friend, the officer, pulling wry faces and shrieking at
th