himney flues, pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows
with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here
and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some
inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high
over all. On each side, a row of shops, as densely set as may be,
occupying, in fact, intervals between the square stone shafts, about
eight feet high, which carry the first floors: intervals of which one
is narrow and serves as a door; the other is, in the more respectable
shops, wainscotted to the height of the counter and glazed above, but
in those of the poorer tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares
laid on benches and tables in the open air, the light in all cases
entering at the front only, and fading away in a few feet from the
threshold into a gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but
which is generally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at the
back of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin. The less
pious shopkeeper sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is contented
with a penny print; the more religious one has his print coloured and
set in a little shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with perhaps a
faded flower or two on each side, and his lamp burning brilliantly.
Here, at the fruiterer's, where the dark-green water-melons are heaped
upon the counter like cannon balls, the Madonna has a tabernacle of
fresh laurel leaves; but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out,
and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull gleam of the
studded patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in the
darkness. Next comes a "Vendita Frittole e Liquori,"[154] where the
Virgin, enthroned in a very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a
back shelf, presides over certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too
ambiguous to be defined or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at
the regular wine-shop of the calle, where we are offered "Vino
Nostrani a Soldi 28-32," the Madonna is in great glory, enthroned above
ten or a dozen large red casks of three-year-old vintage, and flanked
by goodly ranks of bottles of Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and
for the evening, when the gondoliers will come to drink out, under her
auspices, the money they have gained during the day, she will have a
whole chandelier.

A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, and,
glancing as we pas