nto a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The
muffled, ghostly cries of "_gundola! gundola!_" from invisible
gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station
even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the _Casa
Kirsch_ open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice
were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I
drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud
with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice
upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to
think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into
centuries before a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining
in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim
black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.

I had looked forward to my first _gondola_ ride for that "little first
Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill,
I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the _gondola_ pushed through
the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses
towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the
stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure
at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and
was swallowed up again.

And after we were on the landing of the _Casa Kirsch_, and up in our
rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our
windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my
impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there
had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by
one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me,
the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa
and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful nightmare of
which all I was now seeing became but a part: the _Riva_, canals, sails,
_Bersaglieri_, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the
_Piazza_, _gondolas_, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists,
the _Campanile_, following one upon another with the inconsequence of
troubled dreams. And then we were on the _Rialto_ and J. was saying "Of
course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of
Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his