and to extend to the
ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere
posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the
theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for
ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there
was smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking
the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive
Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that
Nebuchadnezzar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously
gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes.

Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the
feudal tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty
effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of
Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band playing
"The Young Recruit." These advantages of situation were not charged in
our bill; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader
to go, when in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good
dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his
sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be
served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but
for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, representing, as
I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the
Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it
there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that
an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over
each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind
which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect
that at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen
talking--as they pass along the neighboring corridor--of wine, in
dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court,
in which there is a stable and--exposed to the weather--a diligence,
and two or three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw,
and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell
like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know.
I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy
does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in
its halls, and horses housed in its bed-chambers,--or as if