at is very interesting," said he. "Could you tell me the date of
Magniagus's marriage?"

"I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But depend
upon it, he was either married or was going to be married, and she ran
away from him and left him without the heart to print for posterity, and
when he took his seat among the saints she said she was so glad; he was
a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!"

He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious volume to
his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and
I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took
me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his
treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann's
_Tractate de Lamiis_, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read
him Keats's poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never
heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old
diplomatist towards a child's woolly lamb. For him literature had never
existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he
left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track of a
Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and never more to be read by any of
the sons of man. In the summer he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By
chance I have learned since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For
aught I could see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in
the intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul
contained that antidote--the _odor di femina_. Perhaps he met it at
Reykjavic and he died of dismay.

I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible for
the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes would banish
Carlotta's distracting image. But no, it was one of the many vain
reflections on which I based a false philosophy. Whether in Beyrout, or
the land of the "sweet singer of Persephone," or Alexandria, or on the
Cannebiere of Marseilles, or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither
a restless pursuit of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the
mountainous republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom
and to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was ironically
driven by fleas--whether on land or sea, in cities or in solitudes, the
vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and the voice that was still (as
far as I was concerned) cooed its