June Days in Venice

VENICE, Wednesday, June 2, 1869.

DEAR PEOPLE : There is so much to tell you about, here, that I see plainly, my only way will be to keep a sort of journal; and if, so doing, I make my letter into a book, I hope enough of the color of the days will get into its pages to repay you for struggling through them. We finished up our May with a christening ! Venetian twins, in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, called in the guide-book vernacular (if there be such a thing as vernacular for men who write guidebooks, bless them!) “the Westminster Abbey of Venice.”

We had wandered about among the tombs of the Doges, and the statues of generals, and the altars, and the candles, and the pictures, and the scaffoldings, and the workmen with mortar, and the begging men and boys and old women, till we were perfectly exhausted, and did not care whether Venice ever had a Doge or not, or if the beggars died of starvation at our feet; and we were just going off, when we saw a woman hurrying into the church with a glass box in her arms. P-, who had seen them before, exclaimed, “O ! O ! there is to be a baby baptized ! ” and we almost ran towards the woman. A baby indeed ! there were two babies, rolled up tight, like mummies, to their very throats ; little knit caps on their heads, which were about as big and red as baldwin apples, and rolled about from side to side as if the stems would n’t last long. The box was, perhaps, a foot and a half or two feet long, and a foot high ; a wooden framework with knobs at the corners, like bed-post tops ; the sides of glass, and holes around the edges in the wood-work to let in the air. The babies were twins and were just one day old ! The woman set the box down on a bench by the wall as indifferently as if it had been a bundle of old clothes, and walked away. There they lay, the two poor little gasping things, all alone, in this huge church with effigies of dead Doges and great equestrian statues all about them. I never supposed anything so uncanny could happen to one in the first fortyeight hours after getting into the world, even if one had the luck to land in Venice ! P-and I stood and watched the poor little creatures ; they hardly seemed human, though their eyes were really bright, and they were unusually wide-awake looking babies for their time of life. One of them was quite uncomfortable, and gasped often as it it would cry, if the bandages were not too tight; the other, which had a red string in its cap, and by that token I thought was the older of the two, seemed to look upon the grimaces of his brother with positive philosophical scorn. He would look him steadily in the eye for a minute, and his mouth seemed quite pursed up with contempt for such babyishness. Presently the woman came back, and with her a priest, slouchy and unneat, with a purple vestment slipped on over his old coat, a little ragged boy carrying a candle, and a stout, handsome fellow, evidently a workman, whom I took to be the father. It turned out afterward that he was only the godfather, which relieved my mind of some anxiety, because I did not at all like the stolid uninterested way in which he looked down on the baby’s face while be held it. The father was in the sacristy through the whole ceremony, and did not so much as peep out. The woman who brought the babies was evidently a servant, and there was no attempt at holiday attire about her ; in fact the whole atmosphere of the thing would have led you to suppose that baptism of twins was an every-day thing to them all, and it was as much as ever they could do to spare time for it. Fancy the group, — the priest, the little boy with the candle, the heavy godfather holding the baby, the listless servant, and two eager and horrified American women looking on ! An old beggar-woman hobbled up too, and stood near. The other poor baby, meantime, was left alone in its glasswalled bed, half-way down the church, the door ajar, and nobody to watch ! Such a chance to steal a baby! The priest mumbled and galloped over a Latin service ; once in a few minutes the little boy said something, which sounded like “ Nan ! Nan ! ” the priest put a great pinch of salt into the poor little thing’s mouth, breathed on it, put oil in its ears, on its breast, and on the back of its neck ; the godfather holding it bolt upright with the poor little one-day-old spine bending and lopping in all directions ! The sacristan spilt some of the oil, and the priest almost laughed out ; then they all laughed ; and the servant took twin No. I back to the case, and brought up No. 2. But we did not stay to see the ceremony over again, it was too horrible.

To-day we have had a picturesque day; first the school of San Rocco, three rooms full of Tintoretto’s pictures, about which, since I do not like many of them and am not competent to speak, I hold my tongue.

Next we went to the church of San Crisostomo ; and here is a picture by Giovanni Bellini, with which one can form an intimate friendship. I should like to spend mornings with these saints ; Saint Jerome, high up on a rock, with his book; poor harassed Saint Augustine, in his mitre and vestments on the right; and on the left Saint Christopher, with the loveliest baby boy astride on his shoulders, holding on tight by one little hand to Christopher’s black hair. O, it is delicious ! but then it won’t sound so, and it is stupid to take up your time with empty names of things.

When we left San Crisostomo we supposed we were going directly home. Surely, we had seen enough for one day ; but as we turned into a narrow canal, we found all the houses decorated with flags, and the flags trimmed with black. “ O Signora,” said Luigi, “ there is a great funeral in the church on that street ! ” Now a funeral was the very thing we had wanted to see ! We had seen how Venetians began, and we had curiosity as to their end ! We had asked Luigi, the day before, if he could not find a funeral for us, and he had replied, quite sadly, that funerals were just now out of season. Nobody died in Venice in the spring ! We did not wonder that nobody wanted to ; but still it seemed a little queer, looked at from a statistical point of view, that nobody did.

However, here was a funeral, ready to his hand, and a grand one too. We hurried down the little street ; every house had the national flag hanging from a window, and the staff wreathed with crape. People were all hurrying in the same direction ; in a few moments we saw a bridge crowded with men and women, all looking eagerly down the canal. “ O,” said we, “ we are just in time ; the funeral cortége is coming up in gondolas ! ” So we pushed and elbowed in among them, and looked down the canal too. Nothing to be seen, and while we were looking, the crowd dissolved and left us. That is the most mysterious thing about an Italian crowd; it gathers dense and black and resolute, in five seconds, from nowhere ; and in five seconds more it has gone like a cloud, and no trace of it is left ; and why it went or why it came you will never know; neither does it know itself.

Again and again I have asked a man or a woman why they were waiting, and they have answered with a laugh, “Because there are many people here!”

The church was near, and we ran there, hoping to catch the funeral yet. The walls were hung with black ; great pyramids of white flowers on the altar, a mass going on, and many people kneeling ; so we sat down. In a few minutes two men came behind us, with a ladder, and began to take down the black hangings. This looked unpromising, and at last we did what it would have been sensible to do at first, — asked if there were a funeral to take place there. It had happened at nine o’clock in the morning, and now, I suppose, they were saying masses for the soul. The men flew about, tearing down the black cambric with most unseemly haste, and scattering dust on everybody’s head ; and we walked away quite crestfallen.

It was a most picturesque little street, about six feet wide, and set thick with stores on each side ; there were bread stores, with piles of all imaginable shapes and colors of bread on the open window-sills (everybody keeps store on the window-sill or the doorstep here), and provision stores, with great baskets of boiled beets, round and flat like pancakes, and young potatoes, size of nutmegs, also boiled ready to eat, were on every corner. Stockings and lace collars and china toys and yellow handkerchiefs hung and swung and stood and waved to right and left of the beets and potatoes. A big butcher was asleep in his little cupboard of a store, and on his window-sill stood six round earthen cups of what I think must have been the dreadful blood puddings I have heard of; it looked simply like blood cooled, with stiffened bubbles on top. It made you faint to think that it could be put there to sell to human beings. Then came a fish trattoria, a scene for Rembrandt to paint, a dark cavern of a shop, lit only from one door and window in front; a stone furnace in the rear, from which came a fiery glow ; two men with arms bared to the shoulder, standing in this fire-light frying fish. Crockery plates set up in rows, on stone ledges above the fire ; and flat wickerwork platters of fish, round, long, flat, whole, sliced, curled, straight, floured, and peppered, ready to fry, standing in tottering piles in the window. This was a picture, and I stayed so long to look at it I nearly got lost going back to the gondola alone. Then I bought out of another window a big round cracker, which I hoped was made out of unbolted wheat, but it proved sour and uneatable, like everything else we find here, except the dazzling white fine bread of the hotels, which is sweet simply because it is lifeless, and has no more nutrition in it than so much cobweb.

As we rowed home, Luigi told us all about the funeral. He had been gossiping with the street in our absence, and had found out that it was the funeral of a Countess Somebody, who had been very patriotic, had run great risks in the times of the wars, had been three times in the Austrian prisons, and had lost most of her property in consequence. She was much beloved by the people ; hence the flags and the kneeling crowds at the mass. Some day he is to take us to see the house in which she died ; though why we want to see it I cannot imagine.

Sunday, the 6th. — O, if I could but catch these swift days and clip their wings ! Dear people, will you not all come to Venice in spring, some year of your years, and have our Luigi for gondolier, and be as content as we ? All I can write you is dusty, dry. You do not know in the least what I have seen. For instance, on the Thursday which followed the Wednesday of the good Countess’s funeral, did I not spend a whole forenoon in the rooms of Rieti, a Jew, with spectacles, who hires a palace to keep store in, and who fattens on the decay of Venetian families, buying up every shred of thing which they have to sell, and setting the relics, one above another, in these palace rooms, to be sold again to American men and women ? And would not the catalogue of the beautiful and weird and uncanny old things I saw there fill a volume ? Chairs and tables and chests and sideboards and mirrors, from time of Doges down ! Glass and china and tapestry, work-boxes and crickets and candlesticks and fans and busts and gravestones ! Yes, old gravestones there were ; and hall lamps, and an old medicine-chest out of which came dusty scent of poisons which helped to thin out the eleventh century, I am sure ! The old leather case was dropping and crumbling to pieces, and the green baize lining seemed half turned to fungus. It was most curiously studded with silver nails, and surely belonged to a physician of degree.

There are six of these stores of antiquity and works of art here, and we have been to four of them ; for my lucky friends have a house, and a room to be refurnished. I feel now as if I had had “the run” of all the Venetian palaces from the tenth to the sixteenth century. I have lifted off the lids of their souptureens, tried the hinges and handles of their sideboards, and pulled out all their secret drawers. I only wish I had a thousand dollars to spend tomorrow morning in small articles which would never be missed out of these bewildering confusions. I would buy for one of you a stool whose seat should be crimson, and should be held up by a black Moor, a cunning little fellow six years old, called Abdallah, I “calculate,” and clothed as to the loins in a tunic of green and silver. Should you mind sitting on him ? He looks very happy, and shows all his teeth. For another, you who give little dinners, I would buy a fish, a china fish, to hold your salmon ; the platter is gay with flowers ; the fish is purple, — mullet, perhaps ; at any rate it is purple and silver, and a lemon at top of him, for a handle, and by the lemon you lift off his upper half, and there will be your salmon ; and what Doge ever had so good a fish out of it before you ? For you who have made a million since I came away, — ah ! for you, my dear, there is a set of furniture in ebony inlaid with white ivory tablets, and the tablets covered with fantastic designs and patterns, like fine etchings. Such a little wardrobe of drawers as stands on a table of this set, three feet high, doors always to be kept open, and twenty little drawers ready to hold all your letters ! If you like it better, there is a set of brown nutwood inlaid more elaborately with ivory, not an inch left plain, and all sorts of carved ivory figures set in the impossible places. These are four things out of thousands ; but I can tell you no more, because in the afternoon we went to Torcello, and that is better worth talking over.

I am tempted to put in a little guidebook about Torcello, because I knew so little about it myself before coming here, that I think some of you may be equally ignorant. But I remember that I promised never to do guide-book at all, and so I will not yield to the temptation. You will know that it is an island, and that before Venice was Torcello, and had churches and bishops and palaces ; it will be easier for you to believe all this than it is for me, though, to be sure, I have seen the cathedral and one church and a bit of one palace ; but for all the rest I find no real faith in my heart. Nothing in all Rome, not even the loneliest old aqueduct-stones in the farthest silence of the Campagna, ever gave me such sense of desolation, of forgotten life, as the atmosphere of this little island. We sailed to it through sunshine, swiftly too, for we had taken an extra rower. The lagoon was astir with fishing-people, and the smoke of work went up from Murano as we passed it, and bells rang from old towers on two other islands as we drew near Torcello. We had been told that many of the great barges which we had seen at sunset coming down the Grand Canal, loaded with cherries and salads and artichokes and all sorts of good garden things, were bringing vegetables from Torcello ; so we thought we were going to a thrifty suburb of Venice, to find some old churches we knew, and we supposed to breathe the air of to-day.

We had not glided ten steps into the silent Torcello canal, before we felt the hush of a burial-place. So low lay the fields, lapping up the slow green water, that it seemed as if we might slip over at any minute, and be floating above the grass. The silence was indescribable. Old stone bridges spanned the canal; and as we rowed under them, the grass nodded down to us from the sides and the top. Had human feet ever brushed it ? We grew afraid. The white honeysuckle was in blossom, and raspberry-bushes with pink flowers made long thickets of hedge over which here and there a scarlet pomegranate looked, as if holding court; bits of old stone-work gleamed out among these wild growths, hardly more than a doorstep at a time, a cornerstone, or a few inches of wall, all so sunk, so bedded in the green, that, but for knowing that a city and palaces had stood there, we should have thought them no more than natural stones. After a time we found a house or two ; then an old bell-tower rising up suddenly and ghost-like in the waste, walled in, as if it were the keep of the powers and principalities of the air. Then we came on a little brood of ducklings ; they looked more human than you could conceive; and then, after another turn, on a custom-house. This took our breath away. I do not know yet what it meant. If I were the right sort of traveller, I should have found out. But its stone steps answered for us to land on, and nobody stopped either us or the ducks, who stepped on shore with us ; and we all crept along together. I felt somehow as if they were so much safer than we.

An old woman whom I almost believe to have been alive showed us the old church of Santa Fosca and the cathedral. I can’t tell you about them. Nobody could. The church is a dome on top of a Greek cross, and a portico with tumbling pillars all around it. The cathedral stands close by, — almost joins the church, and has a floor of mosaic, which makes St. Mark’s look new; high marble reading-desks, and around the semicircular apse, behind the high altar, marble seats rising up in tiers, one above the other, like the Coliseum. In the middle is the bishop’s chair, and all so old that it looked crumbling, though it never can crumble ; and it is not so very old, after all, not more than a thousand years ; but it feels, for some inexplicable reason, older than anything I ever saw. Fresh annunciation lilies were on every altar; their odor filled the air, and drowned out the smell of fungus ; the old woman’s shoes clapped, clapped at the heel with every step she took, and echoed in the dark corners.

Down in the crypt there was a poor old wooden Christ, all cobwebs and dust, — a most pitiful thing. As we walked by she kissed it, and drew her withered hands down the legs to the feet, with a lingering touch of tenderness and passionate devotion, which I never saw equalled, and which made my eyes wet for some minutes. It must be that which has kept her alive in Torcello, — this haggard, hungry old soul. The air is poison there. It was that which drove the people away, and put this melancholy end to the city ; only a few people live there now, who are too poor to live anywhere else, and cannot perhaps resist the temptation of ground to cultivate ; for green things thrive and produce in Torcello, though all the children look as if they had just left their beds for the first time after some terrible illness. They crowded round us and begged, more by their hollow eyes than by their words. I sat down in a great rough stone chair, which stands in an open space before the cathedral, and in front of the old bit of a stone house in which the bishop lived, and gave all the children bon-bons which I had cribbed from our hotel dinner. A questionable charity, I know, but I had no pennies; and beggars have such digestions in Italy, one feels less scruple about giving them unwholesome sweets.

One little girl, six or seven years old, with great gaunt brown eyes and a weight of tangled auburn-black hair, grasped hers firm in her little hand, and never opened it. The other children were tearing open the bright papers and munching down the candy like monkeys. She looked at them wistfully, but did not offer to touch hers. I explained to her that it was good to eat, and tried to make her taste it ; at last, after I had asked her a dozen times why she did not eat it, she whispered so I could but just catch the words, she was so frightened, that she kept it for her little brother. Did n’t I turn my pocket wrong side out, and find one more for that little angel ? and did n't she bite into it in about the shortest second ? And do you think I believe in original depravity ? As I turned back for my last look at the desolate, grass-grown piazza and the cathedral and the church and the bell-tower, the children were all scrambling to get up into the stone chair (they call it Attila’s chair, because he never sat in it, I suppose); three were already in, two more climbing up, and a poor little two-year-old tugging away at one of the six legs hanging down in front, and trying in vain to lift himself up by it.

Yesterday I was heroic, stayed in the house, and wrote all the forenoon. In the afternoon we rowed over to the Enchanted Island, that is, the Lido ; the girls and Mrs. and Miss Twent into the water in Venetian bathing-dresses, hired for two francs, and swam about as if they had been Brides of the Adriatic all their lives. I sat on an upper stair and watched them and the sea ; mostly the sea, which was pale soft gray in the distance, and green close at my feet. There were many people rowing back and forth on it, and some of their sails were orange, and some looked rose-pink against the sky. Why do not all sailors have orange and pink sails, I wonder ? it is all a sail needs to make it as beautiful as a cloud, and it signifies so much more.

Sunday, 13th. — This Sunday was the anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution by Italy, and all the houses were bright with flags ; the square of Saint Mark’s was gay with red and green and white, and in the evening there was to be music on the canal. We commissioned Luigi to buy an Italian flag for our gondola, to show our sympathy with freedom, and anticipated a fine night on the water. Alas ! At six o’clock the sky was black, and it thundered mutteringly in the east; however, we would not be kept in, even by its beginning to sprinkle as we took our seats in the gondola ; actually under umbrellas we rowed up to the Rialto, and displayed our flag. Some of the gondoliers saluted us as we passed, and they all looked pleased and smiled.

The band was playing on a great barge in front of the prefect’s house, and a few determined people were creeping about under umbrellas as we were ; but it was a failure. The sky grew blacker and the drops bigger, and against our wills we went home. To be out in the rain, in Venice, is too much to be borne by the stoutest soul. To be between two fires is always accounted a bad thing in battle ; but to be between two waters is as bad. Going home we passed a grave-looking American family, singing psalm-tunes in their gondola. It sounded very pleasant, but I could not resist the suspicion that it was a kind of a sop to their consciences for being out on the Grand Canal so near sunset of a Sunday.

Last Wednesday went for looking over photographs in the morning, and for three or four not especially interesting churches in the afternoon, but you know, without my taking time to say it, that simply to go from one place to another, in this wonderful sea-city, is a delight in itself. If it waited for me to say where we should go, we should never go anywhere. It never seems to me to make the least difference. I feel as if the gondola knew and would go of itself. I should sink down if I were alone and give no orders to the invisible Luigi. Luckily for me, Nand P-are more wise. Nis our guide, and has always something to propose for each day, which is just the best tiling to do. Thanks to her, we have in this four weeks seen Venice most thoroughly. On Thursday we spent the whole morning in the Academy, with the beloved pictures. I feel that I am so entirely ignorant of art, that I have hardly right to say what I think about any picture. But I am sure of one thing, — pictures and poems are one. All the pictures I have seen, which have impressed me, are poems ; and I see that even to my ignorance it becomes clearer and clearer in what measure they are written. Also, I see, that it is as silly to like, or even to be ready to like, all the pictures painted by one man, simply because they are his, as it is to believe that one’s favorite poet could not write a poor thing.

I am wondering about many things in these days, of which I have nobody here to ask, and no books to help me. I am sure that if one knew literature and art well enough, close parallels could be drawn out between poems and pictures ; and I wonder if there would not be historical agreements too ? Some of you who know, write and tell me what you think about this. Now I find Carpaccio to be a man who painted ballads ! All his pictures have the ring and the movement, with the light touch. There is a series of them in the Academy which tells the story of Saint Ursula. I sit and read it over and over and over, as you can “How they brought the good News to Ghent.” He does not forget what the little page said, nor that on that day the maiden was ill at ease ; or that while the ambassadors asked the king for the hand of his daughter, outside of the gate sat an old stern woman who liked not these foreign wooings, and muttered that ill would come. Every picture is a complete ballad in itself; as you look at them you involuntarily walk with steps set to the sound of a singer.

Then there is Bellini, whose pictures are gentle and tender and are like quaint sacred songs. Always he puts at base of the pictures little angels or babies sitting with crossed legs, and playing on lutes the accompaniment to the song. Most of his pictures are called “ Madonna with two Saints,” “ Madonna with four Saints,” “ Madonna and Child,” etc., etc. I always think of them as “ The true Song of the Day when Catharine and Agatha met Mary and the child Jesus,” or “ The Greeting of Saint Agnes to the Infant Lord,” or “ The Words of Saints Jerome and Christopher to Augustine the Monk.” But for all this, Bellini has painted many Madonnas whose faces are like faces of wood; and one frightful picture of his has in the clouds over the Madonna’s head, seven cherub heads of fiery scarlet-like lobster! There are two pictures in the Academy by a Martino da Udine, a rare man of Bellini’s day and school, who has left only few things. One of these is the “ Angel of the Annunciation,” the other is a Madonna, both single figures, severe, alone, no accessories, but an air of Heaven about the one, and of sanctified earth in the other, which it is good to see. I know lines in George Herbert which are like these pictures. Titian’s single heads and single figures are like sonnets, either solemn and slow, with the whole of the man’s life concentrated into that day’s voice, or vivid, fiery like the passionate outpouring of one moment! His “ Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple” is the picture I like best of all the pictures I have seen yet (except the “ Last Communion of Saint Jerome,” by Domenichino, in Home). It is a grand epic poem. There is the whole of Jerusalem and the worship of the Temple in the figures of the high-priests — all Jewry in the crowd below, and all Christianity and redemption in the figure of the little Virgin. All my life, blue will be more sacred to me by reason of this little Virgin’s gown ! And as for red, it has always been to me like the key-note of a universe of hidden things ; like a very spell in the air ; and now I know that Titian had been taken inside of its mystery and signed with its sign. Every day I see men in the Academy sitting down calmly to copy Titian’s red ! and I wonder at their being suffered to go about without keepers.

From the Academy we went to the house of two old Venetian ladies, sisters of an artist whom Pand N-knew when they were here before, and who made a copy of one of Bellini’s pictures for them. She was sick and deformed and poor, but had great talent as a copyist, and had worked with great industry, for all the rooms of the little house were hung with her drawings and paintings. She died some two years ago ; and these two poor old sisters were so gratified and touched at her being remembered and sought out by strangers for whom she had painted, that it was hard to know what to say to them, (especially if you did not know many words of their language !) But the sight of the house, and their way of living, was most interesting. After all, one such interior picture is worth scores of common outside views ; they must once have “ seen better days,” everything in their manner and surroundings showed this. They have now no servant, and one sister could not see us this morning. We knew by the stir and the odors that she was cooking their dinner ; and who but she could it have been who snatched and hid the string of onions which, when we arrived, was hanging on the hat-rack in the front hall, by side of an old cotton umbrella, and when we went away was no longer there ? The sister we saw was seventy years old ; her eyes were faded and her lips very shaky : but she must once have been handsome ; and the woman had not by any means died out of her old heart, for when I recognized, as her portrait, the face of a handsome woman of not more than thirty-five, among her sister’s paintings on the walls of the little parlor, her wrinkled cheeks flushed with pleasure, and she smiled, a little as she might have smiled the day the picture was painted.

She wore, just as such pitiful “ genteel ” old ladies do at home, and I suppose all the world over, skimpy black clothes, gray with age, and a forlorn dusty black lace thing on the back of her head ; they always look more like palls than like caps, on that kind of old lady. They asked high prices for their sister’s pictures, and I am afraid they will not sell all of them. The girls bought a lovely little picture of a picturesque Palace on the Grand Canal, at which we look almost every afternoon. They could hardly have found a more vivid bit of Venice, to carry away with them, than this little sketch by the poor dead Raffaella.

In the afternoon we went into the house of another Venetian family. Such a contrast ! This family’s name is Giovanelli ; and the Prince Giovanelli married a Contarini ; and of the Contarinis, five have been Doges ! and the house in which this Giovanelli and Contarini live is the most splendid palace in Venice. Did we not do well to go to the poor old sisters first ? It was like the one bit of red which Titian throws in at last in the distance of his pictures which brings all the other colors out. But you see plainly that of this palace I cannot tell you much, because there is a limit to a letter, though you may think I don’t know it ; neither did I half tell you about the other little home. I shall remember it quite as long as the grand one. Mrs. Contarini Giovanelli is the only palace owning lady that I have envied. I would not have taken one of the superb palaces in Genoa as a gift, if I were to be compelled to stay in their great ghostly rooms. But this Giovanelli palace, superb as it is, is cosey. Think of that ! a cosey palace ! a boudoir of blue, blue damask from ceiling to floor, and a ceiling like a hollow shell, and a rounding blue satin sofa, on which she sits and mends her husband’s shirts. How do I know ? By this token, that in a costly glass toy, on a little table before the sofa, and among a thousand dollars or so worth of other trifles in the way of baskets and statuettes and boxes, were three old shirt-bosom buttons ! close to her work-basket, which might have been yours or mine, it was so neat and simple. Their bedroom is regal,— ebony and yellow damask : but — ah, the but, even in a palace ! On this gorgeous ebony stood, in easy reach from one of the yellow satin beds, cold cream and a bottle of magnesia ! Heartburn, you see, even for a descendant of Doges, in this dream of a palace. I, who never had heartburn, and would die before I took magnesia, chuckled and passed on.

A crimson room, satin tapestry, on walls with raised velvet figures ; a yellow and white room, the tapestry woven to fit, with the coat of arms wrought in here and there, a picturegallery hung with claret velvet, and holding rare pictures. Titian, and Veronese, and Bellini, and Dürer, and Van Dyck, and Rembrandt ; a diningroom with carvings and purple velvet, and china which was a study in itself; a sitting-room with a grand piano, and a marvellous bird-cage of gay latticework alternating with transparencies on which were painted morning-glories and honeysuckles ! In the cage, seven little Japanese birds, drab and scarlet and gray; on the piano, cigars of several sorts, ready for the prince after dinner. This is a skeleton glimpse for you of the Giovanelli’s ways of living.

I shall never forget the glow on the faces of some of Titian’s portraits of Doges, which hang in the crimson room : not all the heat of the red tapestry of Lyons can dull the glow of the orange and red mantles, or approach the kindling fire in the faces.

“ Is there a library ? ” said we.

“ No,” said the courteous and elegant creature, called servant, who had showed us his master’s house. And somehow I instantly felt as if it had been quite impertinent to ask, and as if, perhaps, after all, books were a superfluous indulgence. The prince must read, for he is “ Syndic of Venice ” and “ Senator of Italy ” ; but not a book did we see, except some ornamental ones to match the crimson furniture.

Yesterday, two more churches, — San Zaccaria, which is the first church in Venice I have liked ; and San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, a little one-room, upper-chamber sort of a church, in an out - of - the - way quarter, where are nine quaint old pictures by my favorite ballad-man Carpaccio ; sung when he was young ; with too many adjectives, but ringing, ringing like all the rest. I shall grow to remember his things better than any others if I study them much more ; that also is like the hold a ballad gets on you ; it haunts your downsitting and uprising as no other verse can.

H. H.