Mark--a circumstance which secured for the table a sort
of public veneration.

Whenever we could contrive to get into a church tower we thought it great
fun to frighten all the parish by ringing the alarm bell, as if some fire
had broken out; but that was not all, we always cut the bell ropes, so
that in the morning the churchwardens had no means of summoning the
faithful to early mass. Sometimes we would cross the canal, each of us in
a different gondola, and take to our heels without paying as soon as we
landed on the opposite side, in order to make the gondoliers run after
us.

The city was alive with complaints, and we laughed at the useless search
made by the police to find out those who disturbed the peace of the
inhabitants. We took good care to be careful, for if we had been
discovered we stood a very fair chance of being sent to practice rowing
at the expense of the Council of Ten.

We were seven, and sometimes eight, because, being much attached to my
brother Francois, I gave him a share now and then in our nocturnal
orgies. But at last fear put a stop to our criminal jokes, which in those
days I used to call only the frolics of young men. This is the amusing
adventure which closed our exploits.

In every one of the seventy-two parishes of the city of Venice, there is
a large public-house called 'magazzino'. It remains open all night, and
wine is retailed there at a cheaper price than in all the other drinking
houses. People can likewise eat in the 'magazzino', but they must obtain
what they want from the pork butcher near by, who has the exclusive sale
of eatables, and likewise keeps his shop open throughout the night. The
pork butcher is usually a very poor cook, but as he is cheap, poor people
are willingly satisfied with him, and these resorts are considered very
useful to the lower class. The nobility, the merchants, even workmen in
good circumstances, are never seen in the 'magazzino', for cleanliness is
not exactly worshipped in such places. Yet there are a few private rooms
which contain a table surrounded with benches, in which a respectable
family or a few friends can enjoy themselves in a decent way.

It was during the Carnival of 1745, after midnight; we were, all the
eight of us, rambling about together with our masks on, in quest of some
new sort of mischief to amuse us, and we went into the magazzino of the
parish of the Holy Cross to get something to drink. We found the public
room empty,