e pavement mending nets, are the Burano men.

Everybody is dirty. If Venice is the bride of the Adriatic, Burano is
the kitchen slut.

[Illustration: VENUS, RULER OF THE WORLD
FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI
_In the Accademia_]

Yet there is an oasis of smiling cleanliness, and that is the chief
sight of the place--the Scuola Merletti, under the patronage of Queen
Margherita, the centre of the lace-making industry. This building, which
is by the church, is, outside, merely one more decayed habitation. You
pass within, past the little glass box of the custodian, whose small
daughter is steering four inactive snails over the open page of a
ledger, and ascend a flight of stairs, and behold you are in the midst
of what seem to be thousands of girls in rows, each nursing her baby. On
closer inspection the babies are revealed to be pillows held much as
babies are held, and every hand is busy with a bobbin (or whatever it
is), and every mouth seems to be munching. Passing on, you enter another
room--if the first has not abashed you--and here are thousands more.
Pretty girls too, some of them, with their black massed hair and olive
skins, and all so neat and happy. Specimens of their work, some of it of
miraculous delicacy, may be bought and kept as a souvenir of a most
delightful experience.

For the rest, the interest of Burano is in Burano itself in the
aggregate; for the church is a poor gaudy thing and there is no
architecture of mark. And so, fighting one's way through small boys who
turn indifferent somersaults, and little girls whose accomplishment is
to rattle clogged feet and who equally were born with an extended hand,
you rejoin the steamer.

Torcello is of a different quality. Burano is intensely and rather
shockingly living; Torcello is nobly dead. It is in fact nothing but
market gardens, a few houses where Venetian sportsmen stay when they
shoot duck and are royally fed by kitcheners whose brass and copper make
the mouth water, and a great forlorn solitary cathedral.

History tells us that in the sixth century, a hundred and more years
after the flight of the mainlanders to Rialto and Malamocco, another
exodus occurred, under fear of Alboin and the invading Lombards, this
time to Torcello. The way was led by the clergy, and quickly a church
was built to hearten the emigrants. Of this church there remain the
deserted buildings before us, springing from the weeds, but on a scale
which makes simpl