bord, the
Duchess of Parma, and the Infante of Spain; and one met these fallen
princes in the squares and streets, bowing with distinct courtesy to any
that chose to salute them. Every evening the Piazza San Marco was filled
with the white coats of the Austrian officers, promenading to the
exquisite military music which has ceased there forever; the patrol
clanked through the footways at all hours of the night, and the lagoon
heard the cry of the sentinel from fort to fort, and from gunboat to
gunboat. Through all this the demonstration of the patriots went on,
silent, ceaseless, implacable, annulling every alien effort at gayety,
depopulating the theatres, and desolating the ancient holidays.

There was something very fine in this, as a spectacle, Elmore said to
his young wife, and he had to admire the austere self-denial of a people
who would not suffer their tyrants to see them happy; but they secretly
owned to each other that it was fatiguing. Soon after coming to Venice
they had made some acquaintance among the Italians through Mr. Ferris,
and had early learned that the condition of knowing Venetians was not to
know Austrians. It was easy and natural for them to submit,
theoretically. As Americans, they must respond to any impulse for
freedom, and certainly they could have no sympathy with such a system as
that of Austria. By whatever was sacred in our own war upon slavery,
they were bound to abhor oppression in every form. But it was hard to
make the application of their hatred to the amiable-looking people whom
they saw everywhere around them in the quality of tyrants, especially
when their Venetian friends confessed that personally they liked the
Austrians. Besides, if the whole truth must be told, they found that
their friendship with the Italians was not always of the most
penetrating sort, though it had a superficial intensity that for a while
gave the effect of lasting cordiality. The Elmores were not quite able
to decide whether the pause of feeling at which they arrived was through
their own defect or not. Much was to be laid to the difference of race,
religion, and education; but something, they feared, to the personal
vapidity of acquaintances whose meridional liveliness made them yawn,
and in whose society they did not always find compensation for the
sacrifices they made for it.

"But it is right," said Elmore. "It would be a sort of treason to
associate with the Austrians. We owe it to the Venetians