ty is built. It is possible to walk
anywhere by following these streets and crossing the bridges, and each
house has a land-gate as well as a water-gate.

One of these lanes led at last into a small square. A low, narrow
doorway opened into a dark room, looking out upon a dirty little
canal,--far away from the rose-colored, marble-paved Square of St.
Mark--and here Edith found her Italian flag.

The room was cluttered with old rubbish; and a dozen ragged,
hungry-looking men and women sat idly about on broken chairs.

The boy told his errand in Italian to one of the men, who answered him
in an angry tone. They disputed together for several moments, and then
the man brought a small flag from a far corner of the room. The bright
red, green and white stripes of the flag were in good proportion, but
it was made of a cheap, flimsy material.

"I don't care for it," said Edith, putting her hands behind her and
shaking her head.

Immediately everybody in the room began to talk loudly, which so
frightened Mrs. Sprague that she took out her purse and asked, "How
much?"

The boy held up four fingers. "Quattro lire," he said.

"Four lire!" exclaimed Edith indignantly; "that is almost one dollar,
and it isn't worth ten cents."

But the excited Italian voices were all speaking at once, and so
angrily that Mrs. Sprague dropped the money into an old chair, and
seizing the flag with one hand and Edith with the other, she backed
quickly out into the open air.

She forgot that she knew nothing about the way to her hotel, and,
without waiting for the boy, crossed the first bridge she saw, and
struck into another narrow lane. She was too anxious as to her
whereabouts to notice the interesting sights in the streets through
which she hurried; but Edith, with a girl's curiosity, saw everything.

In a small square at one end of a bridge, a woman leaned from an upper
window and lowered a basket to the pavement below. A man with a basket
of fried fish on his arm took a piece of money from the woman's basket
and put in its place a fish from his own. Then he returned to a
little shed near-by, where a woman was frying onions and fish in oil,
on several charcoal stoves.

As they crossed another bridge, they saw a woman lean from a window to
splash her baby up and down in the canal for his daily bath. The baby
was tied to the end of a long rope which his mother gently raised and
lowered, and he laughed with glee every time he hit the wate