from my window
and lunch from the _Riva_, Jobbins interrupted his search and Martin his
argument, the Consul fought shy of the old corner in the _cafe_. And in
the languid laziness that stole upon Venice, as well as upon us, I
penetrated for the first time to the inner meaning of the chapter in his
_Venetian Life_ that Howells labels _Comincia far Caldo_, the season
when repose takes you to her inner heart and you learn her secrets, when
at last you know _why_ it was an Abyssinian maid who played upon her
dulcimer, at last you recognize in Xanadu the land where you were born.

There was never a _festa_ in the _Piazza_ that we were not there,
watching or walking with the bewildering procession of elegant young
Venetians, and peasants from the mainland, and officers, and soldiers,
and gondoliers with big caps set jauntily on their curls, and beautiful
girls in the gay fringed shawls that have disappeared from Venice and
the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the _Riva_ but
are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars,
passing up and down between the arcades and the _cafe_ tables that
overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour
than ever with its domes and galleries and traceries against the blue
of the Venetian night.

There was never a side-show on the _Riva_ that we did not interrupt our
work to go and see it; whether it was the circus in the little tent,
with the live pony, the most marvellous of all sights in Venice; or the
acrobats tumbling on their square of carpet; or the blindfolded,
toothless old fortune-teller, whose shrill voice I can still hear
mumbling "_Una volta soltanta per Napoli!_" when she was asked if
Naples, this coming summer, as the last, would be ravaged by cholera.
She was right, for in the town, cleaned out of picturesqueness, cholera
could not again do its work in the old wholesale fashion.

There was never an excursion to the Islands that we did not join it. To
visit some of the further Islands was not so easy in those days, except
for tourists with a fortune to spend on _gondolas_, and we were grateful
to the occasional little steamboat that undertook to get us there,
though with a crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like
an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the
grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the
symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have