``Fiddledeedee!’’ said I. ``Do you suppose that these translators who have devoted their lives to the study and practice of the art are not competent to interpret the different shades and colors of meaning better than the mere dabbler in foreign tongues?  And then, again, is not human life too short for the lover of books to spend his precious time digging out the recondite allusions of authors, lexicon in hand?  My dear sir, it is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money for that which one can get done much better and at a much smaller expenditure by another hand.’’

From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and took down my favorite copy of the ``Decameron’’ and thumbed it over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little volume.  I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted.  She was such a creature as the great novelist himself would have chosen for a heroine; she had the beauty and the wit of those Florentine ladies who flourished in the fourteenth century, and whose graces of body and mind have been immortalized by Boccaccio.  Her eyes, as I particularly recall, were specially fine, reflecting from their dark depths every expression of her varying moods.

Why I called her Fiammetta I cannot say, for I do not remember; perhaps from a boyish fancy, merely.  At that time Boccaccio and I were famous friends; we were together constantly, and his companionship had such an influence upon me that for the nonce I lived and walked and had my being in that distant, romantic period when all men were gallants and all women were grandes dames and all birds were nightingales.

I bought myself an old Florentine sword at Noseda’s in the Strand and hung it on the wall in my modest apartments; under it I placed Boccaccio’s portrait and Fiammetta’s, and I was wont to drink toasts to these beloved counterfeit presentments in flagons (mind you, genuine antique flagons) of Italian wine.  Twice I took Fiammetta boating upon the Thames and once to view the Lord Mayor’s pageant; her mother was with us on both occasions, but she might as well have been at the bottom of the sea, for she was a stupid old soul, wholly incapable of sharing or appreciating the poetic enthusiasms of romantic youth.

Had Fiammetta been a book—­ah, unfortunate lady!—­had she but been a book she might still be mine, for me to care for lovingly and to hide from profane eyes and to attire in crushed levant and gold and to cherish as a best-beloved companion in mine age!  Had she been a book she could not have been guilty of the folly of wedding with a yeoman of Lincolnshire—­ah me, what rude awakenings too often dispel the pleasing dreams of youth!