the
city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable
uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my
windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but
when the winter broke, and the windows were opened, I found that I had
too much society.

"Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's
shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffe more or less
brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery--nay, there
is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy and sell every kind
of worn out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a
coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood carver's
and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its
integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day.
In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San
Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the
Rialto market.

"Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of
quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an
almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt buttons and a paper of
hair pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.
Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays
of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back
and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who
advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of
toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples
of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets
of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the
crowd--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and
friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolommeo.

"In San Bartolommeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces
above and shops below. The ground floor is devoted to the small commerce
of various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by
tradesmen's families; and on the third or fourth is the appartimento
signorile. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of
innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and