ir fellows ever
turn confidently, secure of finding them in the same place; and
of such, sir, you are the palmary example among my
acquaintance.

"On the circumstances of our retreat from Genoa I need not
dilate. We decamped--I and my brother _artistes_--to Pisa,
where, after an unsatisfactory season, we broke up our company
by mutual consent and went our various ways in search of
fortune. Mr. Badcock--by this time a pantaloon of considerable
promise and not to be sneezed at in senile parts where
affection or natural decay required, or at least excused, a
broken accent--threw in his lot with me: and we bent our steps
together upon this unique city, where for close upon twelve
months I have drawn a respectable salary as Director of Public
Festivities to the Sisterhood of the Conventual Body of Santa
Chiara. Nor is the post a sinecure; since these estimable
women, though themselves vowed against earthly delights,
possess a waterside garden which, periodically--and especially
in the week preceding Lent--they throw open to the public; a
practice from which they derive unselfish pleasure and a useful
advertisement.

"On Thursday last, the Giovedi Grasso, the Abbess had (in
consultation with me) provided an entertainment which not only
attracted the rank and fashion of Venice but (I will dare to
say) made them forget the exhaustion of the maddest day of
carnival with its bull-baiting and battles of _confetti_.
An hour before midnight all Venice had taken to its gondolas
and was being swept, with song and music, towards the Giudecca.
The lagoons swam with the reflections of a thousand moving
lanterns, and all their streaming ribbons of light converged
upon the bridge of Santa Chiara, beyond which, where the
gardens descended in stairways of marble to the water, I had
lined the banks with coloured lamps. Discreet narrow
water-alleys, less flauntingly lit, but with here and there a
caged nightingale singing in the boscage, intersected the
sisters' pleasure-grounds; but the main canal led around an
ample stretch of turf in the midst of which my workmen had
reared a stage for a masque of my composing, entitled _The Rape
of Helen_. Badcock, who was to enact the part of Menelaus, had
at my reques