"Not much, that’s a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I’ve had to face some things, Randolph. I’ve had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I’ve had to laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I’ve had to make my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of a job of excavation. I’ve had other little episodes. But never, son, I may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then before the patient Griselda." "Rot!" was my only answer. "Let’s go in to dinner." It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these foolish notes. It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them. It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that I am writing these notes. If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence, instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by the next boat to Italy. Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material concerning Brunetto Latini—the teacher of Dante. Among the few ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. I have a fine copy of Ser Brunetto’s works, the "Tesoro" and the "Tesoretto", and it seems a shabby enough little encyclopedia in verse of knowledge now somewhat out of date. There must have been, therefore, something in the man himself that enabled Dante to attribute his own greatness to the teacher. But I cannot go to Florence and return in three weeks. Gertrude, I know, will tell me I can do it after we’re married. But she will expect me to "clean up the job" in two weeks. There is nothing about Gertrude that terrifies me so much as her efficiency. I shall never dare to mention the subject to her, and so I shall never attempt it and never know the mystery of Dante’s immortality. It is all one, however; what have I to do with greatness? No more than with marriage. Bur-r-r! The room is cold. _Sparge ligna super foco_, as cheerful old Horace advises. I have just complied and put another log on the fire.