rs he tried to imitate.

The trip was decided on. They would go to Venice! Their friend Cotoner
said "Good-by," he was sorry to part from them but his place was in
Rome. The Pope was ailing just at that time and the painter, in the hope
of his death, was preparing canvases of all sizes, striving to guess who
would be his successor.

As he went back in his memories, Renovales always thought of his life in
Venice with a sort of pleasant homesickness. It was the best period of
his life. The enchanting city of the lagoons,--bathed in golden light,
lulled by the lapping of the water, fascinated him from the first
moment, making him forget his love for the human form. For some time his
enthusiasm for the nude was calmed. He worshiped the old palaces, the
solitary canals, the lagoon with its green, motionless waiter, the soul
of a majestic past, which seemed to breathe in the solemn old age of the
dead, eternally smiling city.

They lived in the Foscarini palace, a huge building with red walls and
casements of white stone that opened on a little alley of water
adjoining the Grand Canal. It was the former abode of merchants,
navigators and conquerors of the Isles of the East who in times gone by
had worn on their heads the golden horn of the Doges. The modern spirit,
utilitarian and irreverent, had converted the palace into a tenement,
dividing gilded drawing rooms with ugly partitions, establishing
kitchens in the filigreed arcades of the seignorial court, filling the
marble galleries to which the centuries gave the amber-like transparency
of old ivory, with clothes hung out to dry and replacing the gaps in the
superb mosaic with cheap square tiles.

Renovales and his wife occupied the apartment nearest the Grand Canal.
Mornings, Josephina saw from a bay window the rapid silent approach of
her husband's gondola. The gondolier, accustomed to the service of
artists, shouted to the painter, till Renovales came down with his box
of water-colors and the boat started immediately through the narrow,
winding canals, moving the silvered comb of its prow from one side to
the other as if it were feeling the way. What mornings of placid silence
in the sleeping water of an alley, between two palaces whose boldly
projecting roofs kept the surface of the little canal in perpetual
shadow! The gondolier slept stretched out in one of the curving ends of
his boat and Renovales, sitting beside the black canopy, painted his
Venetian water-colo