oud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the
absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the
Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.

"This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the
steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.

No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which
was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of
the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was
going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for
Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I
had a return ticket, and would go.

Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the
management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the
gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they
always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy
weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of
the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable,
and making vain efforts at expectoration.

We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat
was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable
fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we
drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of
fortresses one with another.

Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from
the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly
from the water,--not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly,
bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.

IV.

BASSANO.

I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the
Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on
the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the
painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to
treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a
peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he
could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired
from observation of local customs in his native town. This was
the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile
speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does
not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excell