tected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore and
the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square white house,
standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call the Casa
degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old days, it was
the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night's rest before
their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele. So many generations
of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting
home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano,
where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful
churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for
centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at
present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to
cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the
custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres
is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous
walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in
slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash
of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust.

The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding the
vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst.
Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are men dredging for
shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb. Nothing can be
lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than this tranquil,
sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point of the Bersaglio, new
landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland move into sight at
every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage-train comes lumbering along the
railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue. Then we strike
down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and
noble strangers, entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before
the Austrians built their causeway for the trains. Some of the rare
scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left
in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner
of the sixteenth century. From these and from a few rosy fragments on
the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading
figures in a certain courtyard near San Stefano, we form some notion
how Venice loo