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 ?" "Indeed I will, gladly," he replied.
"Well, then," I said, "catch, for here it is!" The joy with which he recovered it was pretty to behold, and the eagerness with which he ran through the leaves, to see that the violets and the primroses and a spray of meadowsweet, young love's bookmarkers, were all in their right places, touched my heart.
He could not thank me enough; and as we stepped out to the inn, some three or four miles on the road, I elicited something of his story.
He was a clerk in a city office, he said, but his dreams were not commercial.

His one dream was to be a great poet, or a great writer of some sort, and this was one of his holidays.