The optical conductivity of the Anderson impurity mode l has been calculated by emp l oying the slave boson technique and an expansion in powers of l i N, where N is the d egeneracy o f the f electron level . This method has been used to find the effective mass of the conduction electrons for temperatures above and below the Kondo tempera ture. For low temperatures, the mass enhancement is f ound to be large while a t high t emperatures, the mass enhancement is sma ll. The conductivity i s f ound to be Drude like with frequency dependent effective mass and scattering time for low independent effective mass and temperatures and scattering time f requency for high t emperatures. The behavior of both the effective mass and the conductivity is in qualitative agreement with experimental r esul t s .