of which, in like manner, we can see little but the long
central ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the sunlight separates
in one glowing mass from the green field beneath and gray moor beyond.
There are no living creatures near the buildings, nor any vestige of
village or city round about them. They lie like a little company of
ships becalmed on a faraway sea.

Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches of the
lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there
are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes
of clustered palaces, a long irregular line fretting the southern sky.
Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood--Torcello
and Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it
does this day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep
distances of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange
fires mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human
voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The
flames rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude of
its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the
paths of the sea.

The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they
left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of
the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending
up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the
temple of their ancient worship.

CADORE, TITIAN'S BIRTHPLACE[57]

BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS

We reached Pieve di Cadore about half-past eleven A.M., delays
included. The quaint old piazza with its gloomy arcades, its antique
houses with Venetian windows, its cafes, its fountain, and its loungers,
is just like the piazzas of Serravalle, Longarone, and other provincial
towns of the same epoch. With its picturesque Prefettura and
belfry-tower one is already familiar in the pages of Gilbert's "Cadore."
There, too, is the fine old double flight of steps leading up to the
principal entrance on the first floor, as in the town-hall at
Heilbronn--a feature by no means Italian; and there, about midway up the
shaft of the campanile, is the great, gaudy, well-remembered fresco,
better meant than painted, wherein Titian, some twelve feet in height,
robed and bearded, stands out against an ultramarine background, looking
very lik