to sleep, night after night a whole year through? I should still not have come to an end! Here we have another Peru!" And tapping on his bald forehead he would sigh, offer a pinch of snuff, and wish me a good night. The majority of these poems were of course devoted to love, and when the little man recited them with sparkling eyes and all the pathos common to his nation, it was easy to forget his five and fifty years. Nevertheless, he lived a bachelor's life, with one old maid-servant and a boy who helped him with his salves and potions, and it seemed strange that with all his love for the beautiful and his comfortable means, he should never have married, nor even now in his sunny autumn seem inclined to make up for lost time. One evening, when we sat smoking together over the good home-grown wine, and I jokingly asked him why he took his monkish nickname so much in earnest, and whether none of the pretty girls that daily passed his shop had contrived to touch his heart, he suddenly looked up at me with a strange expression, and said, "Pretty girls? Well, I daresay they are not so far from it either, and marriage may be better than is reported. But I am too old for a young man, and too young for an old one, or rather let me say too much of a poet. The older the bird, the harder to catch. And then you see, my 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."