en it stormed, as it can in March, and
all day from my window I had looked down upon the dripping _Riva_ and
the wind-waved Lagoon and lines of fishing boats moored to the banks,
and no living creatures except the gulls, and the little white woolly
dogs on the fishing boats covered with sails, and the sailors miserably
huddled together, and gondoliers in yellow oilskins, and the
_Bersaglieri_ in hoods--what the _Bersaglieri_ were doing there even in
sunshine was one of the mysteries of Venice;--then we went with Duveneck
no further than the kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_, for he hated, as we
hated, the _table d'hote_ from which, there as everywhere, German
tourists were talking away every other nationality.

The kitchen was a huge room, with high ceiling, and brass and copper
pots and pans on the whitewashed walls, and a dim light about the
cooking stove, and dark shadowy corners. The _padrona_ laid the cloth
for us in an alcove opposite the great fireplace, while she and her
family sat at a table against the wall to the right, and the old cook
ate at a bare table in the middle, and the maid-servant sat on a stool
by the fire with her plate in her lap, and the man-servant stood in the
corner with his plate on the dresser. Having thus expressed their
respect for class distinctions, they felt no further obligation, but
they all helped equally in cooking and serving, talked together the
whole time, quarrelled, called each other names, and laughed at the old
man's stories told in the Venetian which I only wish I had understood
then as well as I did a few weeks later, when it was too late, for, with
the coming of spring, there were no storms to keep us from the _Panada_.

Just where the _Panada_ was I would not attempt to say; not from any
desire to keep it secret, which would be foolish, for Baedeker long
since found it out; but simply because I could not very well show the
way to a place I never could find for myself. I knew it was somewhere
round the corner from the _Piazza_, but I never rounded that corner
alone without becoming involved in a labyrinth of little _calli_. Nor
would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they
did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded
_trattoria_ in Venice, though the last time I was there, years
afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters
to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the
_Pan