rough the Jews' cemetery. It is a quiet
place, where the flat grave-stones, inscribed in Hebrew and Italian, lie
deep in Lido sand, waved over with wild grass and poppies. I would fain
believe that no neglect, but rather the fashion of this folk, had left
the monuments of generations to be thus resumed by nature. Yet, knowing
nothing of the history of this burial-ground, I dare not affirm so much.
There is one outlying piece of the cemetery which seems to contradict my
charitable interpretation. It is not far from San Nicoletto. No
enclosure marks it from the unconsecrated dunes. Acacia-trees sprout
amid the monuments, and break the tablets with their thorny shoots
upthrusting from the soil. Where patriarchs and rabbis sleep for
centuries, the fishers of the sea now wander, and defile these
habitations of the dead:

Corruption most abhorred
Mingling itself with their renowned ashes.

Some of the grave-stones have been used to fence the towing-path; and
one I saw, well carved with letters legible of Hebrew on fair Itrian
marble, which roofed an open drain leading from the stable of a
Christian dog.

VIII.--A VENETIAN RESTAURANT.

At the end of a long glorious day, unhappy is that mortal whom the
Hermes of a cosmopolitan hotel, white-chokered and white-waistcoated,
marshals to the Hades of the _table-d'hote_. The world has often been
compared to an inn; but on my way down to this common meal I have, not
unfrequently, felt fain to reverse the simile. From their separate
stations, at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flit to a gloomy
gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with
divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a
sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old
Greek comic epithet--+hadou mageiros+--cook of the Inferno. And just as
we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our
society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An
English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's
handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a gondola from
the railway station; a German shopkeeper descanting in one breath on
Baur's Bock and the beauties of the Marcusplatz; an intelligent aesthete
bent on working into clearness his own views of Carpaccio's genius: all
these in turn, or all together, must be suffered gladly through
well-nigh two long hours. Uncomfor