y other
house in the street, but which, how often soever written, no one seems
to regard: "Bestemme non piu. Lodate Gesu."

Sec. VI. We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water
from Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across, and complicated
boats full of all manner of nets that look as if they could never be
disentangled, hanging from their masts and over their sides; and
presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St. Mark on its
archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small
red lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up into
the air (in passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings are
covered with hair, and in several other points the manner of his
sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently the canal turns a little to
the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main bustle of the
water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach of it,
some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass a
considerable church on the left, St. Pietro, and a little square
opposite to it with a few acacia trees, and then find our boat suddenly
seized by a strong green eddy, and whirled into the tide-way of one of
the main channels of the lagoon, which divides the town of Murano into
two parts by a deep stream some fifty yards over, crossed only by one
wooden bridge. We let ourselves drift some way down the current, looking
at the low line of cottages on the other side of it, hardly knowing if
there be more cheerfulness or melancholy in the way the sunshine glows
on their ruinous but whitewashed walls, and sparkles on the rushing of
the green water by the grass-grown quay. It needs a strong stroke of the
oar to bring us into the mouth of another quiet canal on the farther
side of the tide-way, and we are still somewhat giddy when we run the
head of the gondola into the sand on the left-hand side of this more
sluggish stream, and land under the east end of the Church of San
Donato, the "Matrice" or "Mother" Church of Murano.

Sec. VII. It stands, it and the heavy campanile detached from it a few
yards, in a small triangular field of somewhat fresher grass than is
usual near Venice, traversed by a paved walk with green mosaic of short
grass between the rude squares of its stones, bounded on one side by
ruinous garden walls, on another by a line of low cottages, on the
third, the base of the triangle, by the shallow canal from which we