er girl friends in the daytime. In the evening Messer
Folco would often walk there with grave and learned elders like himself,
and stir the sweet air with changing old-time philosophies, while Monna
Beatrice and her maidens sang or danced or luted or played ball. Messer
Folco was a man that cherished the domesticities, and had no desire to
see his home distorted into a house of call where all had a right to
take him by the hand, and he held that the family life flourished best,
like certain plants, in seclusion. But as there is a time for all
things, so Messer Folco found a time for opening his doors to his
friends and acquaintances, and giving them the freedom of his sweet
garden, and bidding them eat and drink and dance and make merry to the
top of their desires, always, of course, under the control of such
decorum as was due to the noble life.

It was to celebrate the laying of the foundation-stone of his hospital
that Messer Folco gave the entertainment of which I have just spoken and
whose eventful consequences I have yet to relate. It must, of course, be
clearly understood that I was not, and, indeed, could not be, always a
witness of the events recorded or a hearer of the words set down in my
narrative. But while it was my happy or sad fortune to witness many of
these events and to hear many of these words, it was also my privilege,
knowing, as I did, those that played their part in my tale, and those
that knew them well and loved them well, to gain so close a knowledge of
the deeds I did not witness and the words I did not hear as to make me
as creditable in the recording them as any historian of old time that
puts long speeches into the mouths of statesmen he never saw, and
repeats the harangues of embattled generals on fields where he never
fought. And so to come back to Messer Folco and his house and his garden
and his friends and the festival he gave them.

XII

DANTE READS RHYMES

The great hall of Messer Folco's house where now he received his guests,
and me among the number, was a mighty handsome piece of work, very brave
with gay color and rich hangings and the costly pelts of Asian beasts,
and very splendidly lit with an infinity of lamps of bronze that had
once illumined Caesarian revels, and flambeaux that stood in sconces of
silver and sconces of brass very rarely wrought. At the farther end the
room gave through a colonnade on to the spacious garden which it was
Messer Folco's privilege