Venice is a beautiful
experience when the soft light of the moon and stars is restin' on the
stately old marble palaces, the tall pillars of St. Theodore and the
Winged Lion, obelisk and spire. With other gondolas all about you, you
seem to be on a sea of glory, with anon music from afar coming sweetly
to your ears from some gondola or palace, and far up some narrow water
street opens with long shafts of light flashing from the gondolier's
lantern or open window. It is all a seen of enchantment.

Though if you should foller up some of them narrow water streets by
daylight, you would see and smell things that would roust you up from
your dream. You would see old boats unloadin' vegetables, taking on
garbage, water-boats pumpin' water into some house, wine shops, cook
shops; you would see dilapidated houses with poorly clad people
standin' in the doorways; ragged, unkempt children looking down on you
from broken windows, and about all the sights you see in all the
poorer streets of any city, though here you see it from a boat instead
of from a hack or trolley car. Green mould would be seen clinging to
the walls, and you would see things in the water that ortn't to be
throwed there.

Moonlight and memory rares up its glittering walls, but reality and
the searchin' life of the present tears 'em down. Where are the three
thousand warships, the three thousand merchant ships, that carried the
wealth and greatness of Venice back in the fifteenth century;
fifty-two thousand sailors, a thousand nobles and citizens and working
people according? Gone, gone! Floated way off out of that Grand Canal
and disappeared in the mists and shadows of the past, and you have to
go back there to see 'em.

The Rialto, which we had dremp about, looked beautiful from the water,
with its one single arch of ninety-one feet lifting up six arches on
each side. But come to walk acrost its broad space you find it is
divided into narrow streets, where you can buy anything from a crown
to a string of beads, from macaroni to a china teapot.

The great square of St. Mark wuz a pleasant place on an evening.
Little tables set out in the street, with gayly-dressed people
laughing and talking and taking light refreshments and listening to
the music of the band, and a gay crowd walking to and fro, and
picturesque venders showing their goods.

But to Tommy nothing wuz so pretty as the doves of St. Mark, who come
down to be fed at two o'clock, descending thr