y in Venice. He
rejoices in his church and in your pleasure in it. He displays first the
Bellini--a Madonna with the strong protective Bellini hands about the
child, above them bodiless cherubim flying, and on the right a
delectable city with square towers. The Basaiti is chiefly notable for
what, were it cleaned, would be a lovely landscape. Before both the
sacristan is ecstatic, but on his native heath, in the sacristy itself,
he is even more contented. It is an odd room, with carvings all around
it in which sacred and profane subjects are most curiously mingled: here
John the Baptist in the chief scenes of his life, even to imprisonment
in a wooden cage, into which the sacristan slips a delighted expository
hand, and there Nero, Prometheus, Bacchus, and Seneca without a nose.

Re-entering the gondola, escorted to it by hordes of young Muranese, we
move on to the Grand Canal of the island, a noble expanse of water.
After turning first to the right and then to the left, and resisting an
invitation to enter the glass museum, we disembark, beside a beautiful
bridge, at the cathedral, which rises serenely from the soil of its
spacious campo.

The exterior of S. Donato is almost more foreign looking than that of S.
Mark's, although within S. Mark's is the more exotic. The outside wall
of S. Donato's apse, which is the first thing that the traveller sees,
is its most beautiful architectural possession and utterly different
from anything in Venice: an upper and a lower series of lovely, lonely
arches, empty and meaningless in this Saharan campo, the fire of
enthusiasm which flamed in their original builders having died away, and
this corner of the island being almost depopulated, for Murano gathers
now about its glass-works on the other side of its Grand Canal. Hence
the impression of desertion is even less complete than at Torcello,
where one almost necessarily visits the cathedral in companies twenty to
fifty strong.

At the door, to which we are guided by a boy or so who know that
cigarettes are thrown away at sacred portals, is the sacristan, an aged
gentleman in a velvet cap who has a fuller and truer pride in his fane
than any of his brothers in Venice yonder. With reason too, for this
basilica is so old as to make many Venetian churches mere mushrooms, and
even S. Mark's itself an imitation in the matter of inlaid pavement.
Speaking slowly, with the perfection of enunciation, and burgeoning with
satisfaction, the o