d coats, and the hugest jack-boots. The streets about the doors of the
hotels resound with the cracking of whips and the stamping of horses,
and are encumbered with carriages, heaps of baggage, porters,
postillions, couriers, and travelers. Night at length arrives--the time
of spectacles and funerals.

The carriages rattle toward the opera-houses. Trains of people,
sometimes in white robes and sometimes in black, carrying blazing
torches and a cross elevated on a high pole before a coffin, pass
through the streets chanting the service for the dead. The Brethren of
Mercy may also be seen engaged in their office. The rapidity of their
pace, the flare of their torches, the gleam of their eyes through their
masks, and their sable garb, give them a kind of supernatural
appearance. I return to bed, and fall asleep amid the shouts of people
returning from the opera, singing as they go snatches of the music with
which they had been entertained during the evening.

III

VENICE

THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA[42]

BY CHARLES YRIARTE

To taste in all their fulness his first impressions of Venice, the
traveler should arrive there by sea, at mid-day, when the sun is high.
By degrees, as the ship which carries him enters the channels, he will
see the unparalleled city emerging from the lap of the lagoon, with its
proud campaniles, its golden spires, its gray or silvery domes and
cupolas. Advancing along the narrow channels of navigation, posts and
piles dot here and there with black that sheet of steel, and give
substance to the dream, making solid and tangible the foreground of the
illusive distance.

Just now, all that enchanted world and fairy architecture floated in the
air; little by little all has become distinct; those points of dark
green turn into gardens; that mass of deep red is the line of the
ship-building yards, with their leprous-looking houses and with the
dark-colored stocks on which are erected the skeletons of polaccas and
feluccas in course of construction; the white line showing so bright in
the sun is the Riva dei Schiavoni, all alive with its world of
gondoliers, fruit-sellers, Greek sailors, and Chioggiotes in their
many-colored costumes. The rose-colored palace with the stunted
colonnade is the Ducal Palace. The vessel, on its way to cast anchor off
the Piazzetta, coasts round the white and rose-colored island which
carries Palladio's church of Santa Maria Maggiore, whose firm campanile
stands