o. Purge yourself of such folly. Poetry died with the
ancients. Virtue, my young friend, not verses. Will you dine with me? We
will eat beans and defy Pythagoras."

Dante shook his head.

"I thank you," he answered, slowly, and I supposed it grieved him a
little to deny so wise a man, "but I may not. I keep a tryst here."

Messer Brunetto instantly assumed an air of alarm, and he allowed his
voice to tremble as he said, "With no woman, I hope."

Dante looked at him squarely. "With no woman, I swear. I have no more to
do with women. What woman is as fair as philosophy, as winsome as
wisdom?"

Messer Brunetto beamed on him with an admiring smile.

"Right, my son, right!" he cried, delighted. "Better Seneca for you than
sensuality; Virgilius than venery. When you are as ripe as I, you may
trifle awhile if you like with lightness." Here I, listening, sniggered,
for it was blown about the city that Messer Brunetto had his passions or
fancies or vagaries, call them what you will, and humored them out of
school hours. "For the present," he went on, "read deep and lie chaste,
and so farewell."

He patted Dante again paternally on the shoulder and wished him
good-day, and went off down the street, muttering to himself, as I make
very little doubt, his wonder that any could be found so foolish as to
wish to string rhymes together when they might be studying the divine
philosophies of the ancients. As for Messer Dante, he stood for a while
where his master had left him, as one that was deep in thought, and we,
though we had a mind to spring out and accost him, yet refrained, for I
knew of old that when my friend was deep in his reflections he was
sometimes inclined to be vexed with those that disturbed him. So we
still lingered and peeped, and presently Dante sighed and went over to
where the bookstall stood and began turning over some of the parchments
that lay on the board. As he did so the bookseller popped his head out
at him from the booth, as a tortoise from his shell, and I never beheld
tortoise yet so crisp and withered as this human. Messer Cecco Bartolo
was his name. And Dante addressed him. "Gaffer Bookman, Gaffer Bookman,
have you any new wares?"

The bookseller dived into the darkness of his shop again and came out in
a twinkling with an armful of papers, which he flung down on the board
before Dante. "There," he said. "There lie some manuscripts that came in
a chest I bought last week. Is there one of them t