diamond given by a French
king; item, a prodigious carbuncle; item, three unicorns' horns. But
what are these compared with the sacred relics?

"Dear Margaret, I stood and saw the brazen chest that holds the body of
St. Mark the Evangelist. I saw with these eyes and handled his ring, and
his gospel written with his own hand, and all my travels seemed light;
for who am I that I should see such things? Dear Margaret, his sacred
body was first brought from Alexandria, by merchants in 810, and then
not prized as now; for between 829, when this church was builded, and
1094, the very place where it lay was forgotten. Then holy priests
fasted and prayed many days seeking for light, and lo! the Evangelist's
body brake at midnight through the marble and stood before them. They
fell to the earth; but in the morning found the crevice the sacred body
had burst through, and peering through it saw him lie. Then they took
and laid him in his chest beneath the altar, and carefully put back the
stone with its miraculous crevice, which crevice I saw, and shall gape
for a monument while the world lasts. After that they showed me the
Virgin's chair, it is of stone; also her picture, painted by St. Luke,
very dark, and the features now scarce visible. This picture, in time of
drought, they carry in procession, and brings the rain. I wish I had
not seen it. Item, two pieces of marble spotted with John the Baptist's
blood; item, a piece of the true cross, and of the pillar to which
Christ was tied; item, the rock struck by Moses, and wet to this hour;
also a stone Christ sat on, preaching at Tyre; but some say it is the
one the patriarch Jacob laid his head on, and I hold with them, by
reason our Lord never preached at Tyre. Going hence, they showed me
the state nursery for the children of those aphrodisian dames, their
favourites. Here in the outer wall was a broad niche, and if they bring
them so little as they can squeeze them through it alive, the bairn
falls into a net inside, and the state takes charge of it, but if too
big, their mothers must even take them home again, with whom abiding
'tis like to be mali corvi mali ovum. Coming out of the church we met
them carrying in a corpse, with the feet and face bare. This I then
first learned is Venetian custom, and sure no other town will ever rob
them of it, nor of this that follows. On a great porphyry slab in the
piazza were three ghastly heads rotting and tainting the air, and in
their