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