Upon a day not much later in the month--a goodly day which thousands without a doubt were thinking all too short for the useful or merely delectable things they wanted to do--a certain young man in Florence would, if he could, have treated this mellow golden masterpiece of autumn's like a bad sketch, torn it across and dropped it into the waste-basket. What is one to do with a day when nothing that has been invented seems enough fun to pay for the bother? He did not wish to paint, he did not wish to read, or to play on the piano, as he sometimes did in solitude, with one hand, to solace himself by re-framing a remembered melody. He did not wish to go out, but was restless from staying in. He did not want to see the face of friend or foe, but could no longer endure to be alone. He stood for a moment in the middle of the floor, with his hands over his face, the ends of his fingers pressing back his eyeballs, and got in his throat a taste of the bitter waters which he felt as a perpetual pool in the center of his heart. Next minute he sneered at himself, like a schoolmaster at a boy who blubbers, and without further paltering put on his hat, took up a very slender cane with a slender grasp of yellow ivory, and ran down the long stairs of his house to the street. "Air and exercise, air and exercise!" This prescription he repeated to himself, and, surely enough, in a quarter of an hour felt better. He was on Via Tornabuoni. Passing Giacosa's, he glanced in to see if it were any one he knew taking tea so early behind the great plate glass window. No, they were chance English. He halted before a shop farther on to look at a display of jewelry, wondering that there should be fools enough in the whole world to support one such dealer in turquoise trinkets that at once drop out their stones; crude, big mosaics, and everlasting little composition-silver copies of the Strozzi lantern. He crossed the street and entered the bank, where he found the usual table strewn with weeklies and monthlies for the advantage of those clients who must be asked to wait. He seated himself with his face so directed that if an acquaintance should enter, he need not bow, and turned over the magazines one after the other. It hurt him like a direct personal injury to find these authors all alike so shallow, dishonest, giving the public not their thought or their experience, but something, anything, it would buy. "A little more air and exercise is what I evidently need," said the young man, and again went out into the streets. He turned toward the river, and had not followed the Lungarno for more than ten yards before it was with him as when, looking out of the window in despair at the weather, we see a break in the clouds. His step took on alertness; his face lighted in the very nicest way.