and crooked mouth, appeared on the threshold.
It was a priest whom the family had known only a short time, and of whom
they were not particularly fond, but whom they received and welcomed at
their house--more, however, out of respect for his garb than for his
person. All except the young man grouped around him, crying out, "Well!
have you heard the news? It is all over, thank Heaven! Tell us! speak!"

"But what news?" asked the priest, looking in the face of each one in
turn with a pair of rolling eyes.

They all told him at once, hastily and eagerly, of the festival, the
pardon, the reconciliation.

The priest looked at all of them with the air of a man who fears that he
has fallen into the midst of a set of lunatics: then flashing a fiery
glance upon the young man, he exclaimed with a sinister smile, "There is
not a shadow of truth in it, fortunately."

"Oh!" they all exclaimed, turning toward the son.

The latter, without seeming disconcerted, looked fixedly at the priest,
and said to him, in a half-sorrowful, half-contemptuous voice, "Only,
reverend father, do not say 'fortunately.' You are an Italian: say,
'What a pity that it is not so!'"

And all the others flew once more at the priest, and, as is generally
the case, more incensed against the one who had destroyed the illusion
than against him who had created it, they repeated almost
involuntarily, "Decidedly! Say rather, 'What a pity!'"

"I?" answered the priest, turning toward his breast a long knotty
finger: then, in a bitter vibrant voice, "Never!"

The old man, thus suddenly wounded and so rudely deprived of the
delightful emotion which had agitated him, lost his wits as usual, and
stretching out his arm toward the door framed with his lips the word
"Begone!"

The priest disappeared, slamming the door behind him. The son threw his
arms around his father's neck: the latter, looking toward the door,
muttered in a feeble voice, "Heartless man!"

A VENETIAN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

A strange figure, a man almost wholly forgotten, but one to whom Goethe,
Schiller, Tieck and Schlegel owed not a little, is yet to be known by
whoever cares to rub the dust from old memoirs and turn the pages of
some rare and racy volumes. And in knowing this Venetian much may be
learned of the decadence of Venice, which had come to produce, not the
great and reverent and serious men who laid her stones and covered her
walls with sweet and splendid works expres