the water's edge; its
gay ladies and stately doges. What a magnificent pageant was that which
took place every Ascension Day, when the doge and all his court sailed
grandly out in the "Bucentaur," or state galley, with gay colors
flying, to the tune of lively music, and went through the oft-repeated
ceremony of dropping a ring into the Adriatic, in token of marriage
between the sea and Venice! This was a custom instituted as far back as
1177. The Venetians having espoused the cause of the pope, Alexander
III., against the emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, gained a great victory
over the imperial fleet, and the pope, in grateful remembrance of the
event, presented the doge with the ring symbolizing the subjection of
the Adriatic to Venice.

But one of the most wonderful things about Venice is that, with the
exception of those I intend to tell you about, there are no horses
there. How charming it must be, you think, when you want to visit a
friend, to run down the marble steps of some old palace, step into a
gondola, and glide swiftly and noiselessly away, instead of jolting and
rumbling along over the cobble-stones! And then to come back by
moonlight, and hear the low plash of the oar in the water, and the
distant voices of the boatmen singing some love-sick song,--oh, it's as
good as a play!

Of course there are no carts in Venice; and the fish-man, the
vegetable-man, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, all
glide softly up in their boats to the kitchen door with their
vendibles, and chaffer and haggle with the cook for half an hour, after
the manner of market-men the world over.

So you see the little black-eyed Venetian boys and girls gaze on the
brazen horses in St. Mark's Square with as much wonder and curiosity as
ours when we look upon a griffin or a unicorn.

[Illustration: THE HORSES OF ST. MARK'S.]

These horses--there are four of them--have quite a history of their
own. They once formed part of a group made by a celebrated sculptor of
antiquity, named Lysippus. He was of such acknowledged merit that he
was one of the three included in the famous edict of Alexander, which
gave to Apelles the sole right of painting his portrait, to Lysippus
that of sculpturing his form in any style, and to Pyrgoteles that of
engraving it upon precious stones.

Lysippus executed a group of twenty-five equestrian statues of the
Macedonian horses that fell at the passage of the Granicus, and of this
group the hor