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n't seem to realise that it takes more than a gondola to make a paternal Doge. I've got to ask you to remember that I was born in Chicago. And it's my bed time. Gondolier! _Albergo! Andate presto!_" "He seems to understand you," said poppa meekly. So we dropped Arthur--dropped him, so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he should ever come up again. But the Senator's joy in Venice found other means of expressing itself. One was an active and disinterested appeal to the gondoliers to be a little less modern in their costume. He approached this subject through the guide with every gondolier in turn, and the smiling impassiveness with which his suggestions were received still causes him wonder and disgust. "I presume," he remonstrated, "you think you earn your living because tourists have got to get from the Accademia to St. Mark's, and from St. Mark's to the Bridge of Sighs, but that's only a quarter of the reason. The other three-quarters is because they like to be rowed there in gondolas by the gondoliers they've read about, and the gondoliers they've read about wore proper gondoliering clothes--they didn't look like East River loafers." "They are poor men, these _gondolieri_," remarked the guide. "They cannot afford." "I am not an infant, my friend. I'm a business man from Chicago. It's a business proposition. Put your gondoliers into the styles they wore when Andrea Dandolo went looting Constantinople, and you'll double your tourist traffic in five years. Twice as many people wanting gondolas, wanting guides, wanting hotel accommodation, buying your coloured glass and lace flounces--why, Great Scott! it would pay the city to do the thing at the public expense. Then you could pass a by-law forbidding gondoliering to be done in any style later than the fifteenth century. Pay you over and over again." Poppa was in earnest, he wanted it done. He was only dissuaded from taking more active measures to make his idea public by the fact that he couldn't stay to put it through. He was told, of course, how the plain black gondola came to be enforced through the extravagance of the nobles who ruined themselves to have splendid ones, and how the Venetians scrupled to depart from a historic mandate, but he considered this a feeble argument, probably perpetuated by somebody who enjoyed a monopoly in supplying Venice with black paint. "Circumstances alter cases," he declar
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