solemn but grand repose. Occasionally the front of a palace
received the rays on its heavy cornices and labored columns, the gloomy
stillness of the interior of the edifice furnishing, in every such
instance, a striking contrast to the richness and architectural beauty
without. Our narrative now leads us to one of these patrician abodes of
the first class.

A heavy magnificence pervaded the style of the dwelling. The vestibule
was vast, vaulted, and massive. The stairs, rich in marbles, heavy and
grand. The apartments were imposing in their gildings and sculpture,
while the walls sustained countless works on which the highest geniuses
of Italy had lavishly diffused their power. Among these relics of an age
more happy in this respect than that of which we write, the connoisseur
would readily have known the pencils of Titian, Paul Veronese, and
Tintoretto--the three great names in which the subjects of St. Mark so
justly prided themselves. Among these works of the higher masters were
mingled others by the pencils of Bellino, and Montegna, and Palma
Vecchio--artists who were secondary only to the more renowned colorists
of the Venetian school. Vast sheets of mirrors lined the walls, wherever
the still more precious paintings had no place; while the ordinary
hangings of velvet and silk became objects of secondary admiration, in a
scene of nearly royal magnificence. The cool and beautiful floors, made
of a composition in which all the prized marbles of Italy and of the
East polished to the last degree of art, were curiously embedded, formed
a suitable finish to a style so gorgeous, and in which luxury and taste
were blended in equal profusion.

The building, which, on two of its sides, literally rose from out the
water, was, as usual, erected around a dark court. Following its
different faces, the eye might penetrate, by many a door, open at that
hour for the passage of the air from off the sea, through long suites of
rooms, furnished and fitted in the manner described, all lighted by
shaded lamps that spread a soft and gentle glow around. Passing without
notice ranges of reception and sleeping rooms--the latter of a
magnificence to mock the ordinary wants of the body--we shall at once
introduce the reader into the part of the palace where the business of
the tale conducts us.

At the angle of the dwelling on the side of the smaller of the two
canals, and most remote from the principal water-avenue of the city on
which th