friend, I was once devoted to a girl who did not care for me--one I
tell you the like of whom will never be seen again. So now I am too
proud, or whatever it may be called, to be flattered even if some
common-place creature--of whom there are twelve to the dozen--were to
fancy me. I prefer to dream myself happy in my verses, and to shape
myself a perfect beauty out of a hundred incomplete ones, like the
Grecian painter--was his name Apelles?--who took for his Venus the eyes
of one neighbour, the nose of another, and thus got the best together
bit by bit. But as for her who really did unite all perfections, and
was so beautiful that you would not believe me if I tried to describe
her, she paid dear for her beauty, and many know the story as correctly
as I do, though if you were to ask any of the older people in the place
about Erminia, they would all bear me out that she was a wonder of the
world, and that during the twenty years that have passed by since then,
nothing has ever happened that made such an impression as her fate and
all connected with it. Come now, I will tell it you, as you already
know the sonnets to her--I allude to the sixty-seven that I keep in the
blue portfolio, of which you said that they really had much of
Petrarch's manner; they all date from the time when the wound was still
fresh; and when once, you have heard the story you can hear them over
again. It is only so that you will thoroughly understand them."

After which, with a sigh that sounded to me rather comic than tragic,
he snuffed the candle, leant back in the arm-chair behind his counter,
half-closed his eyes, and buried his hands in the side-pockets of his
worn-out paletot. It was about nine o'clock in the evening. The Piazza
before the house was still as death, one heard only the prattling of
the brook, and the heavy breathing of the apprentice asleep in the next
room. Then after a long pause he began with his usual exordium.

"_Ecco amico mio_, the matter stands thus. Somewhere about the year
'30--you are too young to remember so far back--this said Erminia lived
here in the village with a mother and sister who are also dead and
buried long ago. If when you leave this door, you turn to the right up
the little street leading to the old ruin on the summit of our hill,
you will come to a small house, or rather hovel, roofless now except
for two worm-eaten beams, and even then it was not much better
protected from sun and rain; only that