coarse in the limbs
for cavalry use, and too light for the guns." In any event, they were
the only four horses, alive or dead, in the whole city, and the
Venetians love them as though they were their children.

If in its war dress the exterior of St. Mark's presents a strange
appearance, the transformation of the interior is positively
startling. Nothing that ingenuity can suggest has been left undone to
protect the sculptures, mosaics, glass, and marbles which, brought by
the seafaring Venetians from the four corners of the globe, make St.
Mark's the most beautiful of churches. Everything portable has been
removed to a place of safety, but the famous mosaics, the ancient
windows, and the splendid carvings it is impossible to remove, and
they are the most precious of all. The two pulpits of colored marbles
and the celebrated screen with its carven figures are now hidden
beneath pyramids of sand-bags. The spiral columns of translucent
alabaster which support the altar, are padded with excelsior and
wrapped with canvas. Swinging curtains of quilted burlap protect the
walls of the chapels and transepts from flying shell fragments. Yet
all these precautions would probably avail but little were a bomb to
strike St. Mark's. In the destruction that would almost certainly
result there would perish mosaics and sculptures which were in their
present places when Vienna was still a Swabian village, and Berlin had
yet to be founded on the plain above the Spree.

If it has proved difficult to protect from airplane fire the massive
basilica of St. Mark's, consider the problem presented to the
authorities by the Palace of the Doges, that creation of fairylike
loveliness, whose exquisite facades, with their delicate window
tracery and fragile carvings, would be irretrievably ruined by a
well-aimed bomb. In order to avert such a disaster, it was proposed to
protect the facades of the palace by enclosing the building in
temporary walls of masonry. It was found, however, that this plan was
not feasible, as the engineers reported that the piles on which the
ancient building is poised would submerge if subjected to such an
additional weight. All that they have been able to do, therefore, is
to shore up the arches of the loggia with beams, fill up the windows
with brick and plaster, and pray to the patron saint of Venice to save
the city's most exquisite structure.

The gilded figure of an angel, which for so many centuries has looked
do