forcing its way up every crooked canal,
no matter how narrow. Two Venetian shipyards are hammering away on their
hulls or polishing their motors. Soon the cost of production will drop
to that of a gondola. Then look out! There are eight thousand machinists
in the Arsenal earning but five francs a day, any one of whom can learn
to run a motor boat in a week, thus doubling their wages. Worse yet--the
world is getting keener every hour for speedy things. I may be wrong--I
hope and pray I am--but it seems to me that the handwriting is already
on the wall. "This way to the Museo Civico," it reads--"if you want
to find a gondola of twenty-five years ago." As for the Luigis and the
Esperos--they will then have given up the unequal struggle.

The only hope rests with the Venetians themselves. They have restored
the scarred Library, and are rebuilding the Campanile, with a reverence
for the things which made their past glorious that commands the respect
of the artistic world. The gondola is as much a part of Venice as its
sunsets, pigeons, and palaces. Let them by special license keep the
Tragfaetti intact, with their shuttles of gondolas crossing bade and
forth--then, perhaps, the catastrophe may be deferred for a few decades.

*****

As it was in Dort and Papendrecht so it is in Venice. Except these
beastly, vile-smelling boats there is nothing new, thank God. Everything
else is faded, weather-worn, and old, everything filled with sensuous
beauty--sky, earth, lagoon, garden wall, murmuring ripples--the same
wonderful Venice that thrills its lovers the world over.

And the old painters are still here--Walter Brown, Bunce, Bompard,
Faulkner, and the rest--successors of Ziem and Rico--men who have loved
her all their lives. And with them a new band of devotees--Monet
and Louis Aston Knight among them. "For a few days," they said in
explanation, but it was weeks before they left--only to return, I
predict, as Jong as they can hold a brush.

As for Luigi and me--we keep on our accustomed way, leading our
accustomed lives. Seventeen years now since he bent to his oar behind my
cushions--twenty-six in all since I began to idle about her canals. It
is either the little canal next the Public Garden, or up the Giudecca,
or under the bronze horses of San Marco; or it may be we are camped out
in the Piazzetta before the Porta della Carta; or perhaps up the narrow
canal of San Rocco, or in the Fruit Market near the Rialto while the
b