ay or two from a feeble lamp at the
back of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin. The less pious
shop-keeper sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is contented with a
penny print; the more religious one has his print colored and set in a
little shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with perhaps a faded
flower or two on each side, and his lamp burning brilliantly. Here at
the fruiterer's, where the dark-green water-melons are heaped upon the
counter like cannon balls, the Madonna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel
leaves; but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out, and there is
nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull gleam of the studded
patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in the darkness. Next
comes a "Vendita Frittole e Liquori," where the Virgin, enthroned in a
very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a back shelf, presides over
certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be defined or
enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at the regular wine-shop of the
calle, where we are offered "Vino Nostrani a Soldi 28.32," the Madonna
is in great glory, enthroned above ten or a dozen large red casks of
three-year-old vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles of
Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and for the evening, when the
gondoliers will come to drink out, under her auspices, the money they
have gained during the day, she will have a whole chandelier.

Sec. XIII. A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black
Eagle, and, glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply
moulded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of vines
resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side;
and so presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San Moise, whence to the
entrance into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the
square), the Venetian character is nearly destroyed, first by the
frightful facade of San Moise, which we will pause at another time to
examine, and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the
piazza, and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging
groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through them into the
shadow of the pillars at the end of the "Bocca di Piazza," and then we
forget them all; for between those pillars there opens a great light,
and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of St.
Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the