days, the common
people absorb a goodly modicum of art education without being aware of
it. I have heard market-women compare the merits of Tintoretto and Paul
Veronese, and stupid indeed is the boat "hooker" in Venice who would not
know a "Titian" on sight.

But the chronology of art is all a jumble to this indolent, careless,
happy people. These paintings were in the churches when their fathers and
mothers were alive, they are here now, and no church has been built in
Venice for three hundred years.

The history of Venice is nothing to a gondolier. "Why, Signore! how
should I know? Venice always has been," explained Enrico, when I asked
him how old the city was.

When I hired Enrico I thought he was a youth. He wore such a dandy suit
of pure white, and his hatband so exactly matched his sash, that I felt
certain I was close upon some tender romance, for surely it was some
dark-eyed lacemaker who had embroidered this impossible hatband and
evolved the improbable sash!

The exercise of rowing a gondola is of the sort that gives a splendid
muscular development. Men who pull oars have round shoulders, but the
gondolier does not pull an oar, he pushes it, and as a result has a flat
back and brawny chest. Enrico had these, and as he had no nerves to speak
of, the passing years had taken small toll. Enrico was sixty. Once he ran
alongside another gondola and introduced me to the gondolier, who was his
son. They were both of one age. Then one day I went with Enrico to his
home--two whitewashed rooms away up under the roof of an old palace on
the Rialto--and there met his wife.

Mona Lisa showed age more than Enrico. She had crouched over a little
wooden frame making one pattern of lace for thirty years, so her form was
bent and her eyesight faulty. Yet she proudly explained that years and
years ago she was a model for a painter, and in the Della Salute I could
see her picture, posed as Magdalen. She got fourteen cents a day for her
work, and had been at it so long she had no desire to quit. She took
great pride in Enrico's white-duck suits and explained to me that she
never let him wear one suit more than two days without its being washed
and starched; and she always pipeclayed his shoes and carefully inspected
him each morning before sending him forth to his day's work. "Men are so
careless, you know," she added by way of apology.

There was no furniture in the rooms worth mentioning--Italians do not
burden themselve