WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLD Picking up the book, I opened it involuntarily at the titlepage, and then—I resisted a great temptation! I shut it again. A little flowery plot of girl's handwriting had caught my eye, and a girl's pretty name. When Love and Beauty meet, it is hard not to play the eavesdropper, and it was easy to guess that Love and Beauty met upon that page. St. Anthony had no harder fight with the ladies he was unpolite enough to call demons, than I in resisting the temptation to take another look at that pen-and-ink love making. Now, as I look back, I think it was sheer priggishness to resist so human and yet so reverent an impulse. There is nothing sacred from reverence, and love's lovers have a right to regard themselves as the confidants of lovers, whenever they may chance to surprise either them or their letters. While I was still hesitating, and wondering how I could get the book conveyed to its romantic owner, suddenly a figure turned the corner of the road, and there was Alastor coming back again. I slipped the book, in distracted search for which he was evidently still engaged, under the ferns, and, leisurely lighting a pipe, prepared to tease him. He was presently within hail, and, looking up, caught sight of me. "Have you found your Shelley yet?" I called down to him, as he stood a moment in the road. He shook his head. No! But he meant to find it, if he had to hunt every square foot of the valley inch by inch. Wouldn't any other book do, I asked him. Would he take a Boccaccio, or a "Golden Ass," or a "Tom Jones," in exchange?—for of such consisted my knapsack library. He laughed a negative, and it seemed a shame to tease him. "It is not so much the book itself," he said. "But the giver?" I suggested. "Of course," he blushingly replied. "Well, suppose I have found it?" I continued. "You don't mean it—" "But suppose I have—I'm only supposing—will you give me the pleasure of your company at dinner at the next inn and tell me its story?"
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