ugh Malamocco town is still distant), with a coastguard
station, a fort, acres of coal and other signs of militancy on the
farther side. It is here that the Lido proper begins and the island
broadens out into meadows.

At the fort pier we are kept waiting for ten minutes while a live duck
submits to be weighed for fiscal purposes, and the delay gives an old
man with razor-fish a chance to sell several pennyworths. By this time
the sun is very near the horizon, setting in a roseate sky over a lagoon
of jade. There is not a ripple. The tide is very low. Sea birds fleck
with white the vast fields of mud. The peacefulness of it all under such
unearthly beauty is almost disquieting.

Next comes Malamocco itself, of which not much is seen but a little
campo--almost an English village green--by the pier, and children
playing on it. Yet three thousand people live here, chiefly growers of
melons, tomatoes, and all the picturesque vegetables which are heaped up
on the bank of the Grand Canal in the Rialto market and are carried to
Venice in boats day after day for ever.

Malamocco was a seat of ducal government when Venice was only a village,
and not until the seventh century did the honours pass to Venice: hence
a certain alleged sense of superiority on the part of the Malamoccans,
although not only has the original Malamocco but the island on which it
was built disappeared beneath the tide. Popilia too, a city once also of
some importance, is now the almost deserted island of Poveglia which we
pass just after leaving Malamocco, as we steam along that splendid wide
high-way direct to Venice--between the mud-flats and the sea-mews and
those countless groups of piles marking the channel, which always
resemble bunches of giant asparagus and sometimes seem to be little
companies of drowning people who have sworn to die together.

[Illustration: FROM THE DOGANA AT NIGHT]

Here we overtake boats on the way to the Rialto market, some hastening
with oars, others allowing their yellow sails to do the work, heaped
high with vegetables and fruit. Just off the mud the sardine catchers
are at work, waist high in the water.

The sun has now gone, the sky is burning brighter and brighter, and
Venice is to be seen: either between her islands or peeping over them.
S. Spirito, now a powder magazine, we pass, and S. Clemente, with its
barrack-like red buildings, once a convent and now a refuge for poor mad
women, and then La Grazia, wher