the Kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_. But in the
_Merceria_ I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while
Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel
apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice
which bored the men from Munich to extinction--really they were so
bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to
the _caramei_ man as the town's one excitement. I thought the
illuminations on Easter Sunday evening, when the _Piazza_ was "a
fairyland in the night," and the music deafened us, and the Bengal
lights blinded us, would help to give them a livelier impression; but,
though they came with us to _Florian's_, it was plain they pitied us for
being so pleased.

They couldn't, for the life of them, see why the place had been so
cracked up by Ruskin. Nothing was right. The _Piazza_ was just simply
the town's meeting place and centre of gossip, like the country village
store, only on a more architectural and uncomfortable scale. The canals
were breeding holes for malaria. The streets wouldn't be put up with as
alleys at home. The language was not worth learning. At the _Panada_,
after we had given our order for dinner, McFarlane would murmur
languidly '_Lo stesso_' and declare it to be the one useful word in the
Italian dictionary; to this Johnson added a mysterious '_Sensa crab_'
when Rossi suggested '_piccoli fees_' under the delusion that he was
talking English; while Anthony was quite content with the vocabulary the
other two supplied him. The climate was as deplorable: either wet and
cold, when the Italian _scaldino_ wasn't a patch on the German stove and
a _gondola_ became a freezing machine; or warm and enervating when they
couldn't keep awake.

They dozed in their _gondola_, they yawned in St. Mark's and the Ducal
Palace and in all the other churches and palaces, and in front of all
the old doorways and bridges and boat-building yards and _traghettos_
and fishing boats and wells and "bits" that Camillo, their gondolier,
was inhuman enough to wake them up to look at. The beauty of Venice was
exaggerated, or if they did come to a "subject" that made them pull
their sketch books out of their pockets, Camillo was at once bothering
them to do it from just where Guardi, or Canaletto, or Rico, or
Whistler, or Ruskin, or some other old boy had painted, etched, or
drawn it--Whistler alone had finished Venice for every artist who came
after