gone to the mender's, I hope, with the same
obstructive accompaniments as went to the setting-up again of the last? If
I don't hear soon, you will have me dancing on wires, which cost as much
by the word as a gondola by the hour.

Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best in San Giorgio di
Schiavone: two are St. George pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some
other saint unknown to me. The St. Jerome series is really a homily on the
love and pathos of animals. First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort
of unclipped white poodle in the pictorial place of honor, all alone on a
floor beautifully swept and garnished, looking up wistfully to his master
busy at writing (a Benjy saying, "Come and take me for a walk, there's a
good saint!"). Scattered among the adornments of the room are small
bronzes of horses and, I think, birds. So, of course, these being his
tastes, when St. Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and
accompanies him when he pays a call on the monks in a neighboring
monastery. Thereupon, holy men of little faith, the entire fraternity take
to their heels and rush upstairs, the hindermost clinging to the skirts of
the formermost to be hauled the quicker out of harm's way. And all the
while the lion stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and Jerome with
shrugs tries to explain that even the best butter wouldn't melt in his
dear lion's mouth. After that comes the tragedy. St. Jerome lies dying in
excessive odor of sanctity, and all the monks crowd round him with prayers
and viaticums, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a "happy death," while
Jerome wonders feebly what it is he misses in all this to-do for which he
cares so little. And there, elbowed far out into the cold, the lion lies
and lifts his poor head and howls because he knows his master is being
taken from him. Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer,
nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to
comfort the disconsolate beast: but _la bete humaine_ has got the
whip-hand of the situation. In another picture is a parrot that has just
mimicked a dog, or called "Carlo!" and then laughed: the dog turns his
head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog
does when you make fun of him.

These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite
glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to
distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt thr