neighbor
cities in the lagoons were peopled by fugitives from the Hunnish
invasion of 452, is so constant and in itself so probable that we seem
bound to accept it as substantially true, though contemporary or nearly
contemporary evidence to the fact is utterly wanting.

The thought of "the glorious city in the sea" so dazzles our
imaginations when we turn our thoughts toward Venice that we must take a
little pains to free ourselves from the spell and reproduce the aspect
of the desolate islands and far-stretching wastes of sand and sea to
which the fear of Attila drove the delicately nurtured Roman provincials
for a habitation.

If we examine on the map the well-known and deep recess of the Adriatic
Sea, we shall at once be struck by one marked difference between its
eastern and its northern shores. For three hundred miles down the
Dalmatian coast not one large river, scarcely a considerable stream,
descends from the too closely towering Dinaric mountains to the sea. If
we turn now to the northwestern angle which formed the shore of the
Roman province of Venetia, we find the coast line broken by at least
seven streams, two of which are great rivers.

These seven streams, whose mouths are crowded into less than eighty
miles of coast, drain an area which, reckoning from Monte Viso to the
Terglon Alps--the source of the Ysonzo--must be four hundred and fifty
miles in length, and may average two hundred miles in breadth, and this
area is bordered on one side by the highest mountains in Europe,
snow-covered, glacier-strewn, wrinkled and twisted into a thousand
valleys and narrow defiles, each of which sends down its river or its
rivulet to swell the great outpour.

For our present purpose, and as a worker out of Venetian history, Po,
notwithstanding the far greater volume of his waters, is of less
importance than the six other small streams which bear him company. He,
carrying down the fine alluvial soil of Lombardy, goes on lazily adding,
foot by foot, to the depth of his delta, and mile by mile to its extent.
They, swiftly hurrying over their shorter course from mountain to sea,
scatter indeed many fragments, detached from their native rocks, over
the first meadows which they meet with in the plain, but carry some also
far out to sea, and then, behind the bulwark which they thus have made,
deposit the finer alluvial particles with which they, too, are laden.
Thus we get the two characteristic features of the ever-cha