t all."

"He went to Amsterdam," said Manning; "that I know."

Before Larry could ask how it was that his friend knew anything about
the place of exile of a man whom he had never heard of ten minutes
earlier, the gondola had paused before the door of the palace in which
dwelt the dealer in antiquities who had in his possession the famous
goblet of Venetian glass. As they ascended to the sequence of rambling
rooms cluttered with old furniture, rusty armor, and odds and ends of
statuary, in the which the modern Jew of Venice sat at the receipt of
custom, both Larry Laughton and John Manning had to give their
undivided attention to the framing in Italian of their wishes. Shylock
himself was a venerable and benevolent person, with a look of
wonderful shrewdness and an incomprehensibility of speech, for he
spoke the Venetian dialect with a harsh Jewish accent, either of which
would have daunted a linguistic veteran. Plainly enough, conversation
was impossible, for he could barely understand their American-Italian,
and they could not at all understand his Jewish-Venetian. But it would
not do to let these _Inglesi_ go away without paying tribute.

"Cio!" said Shylock, smiling graciously at his futile attempts to open
communication with the enemy. Then he called Jessica from the deep
window where she had been at work on the quaint old account-books of
the shop, as great curiosities as anything in it, since they were kept
in Venetian, but by means of the Hebrew alphabet. She spoke Italian,
and to her the young men made known their wants. She said a few words
to her father, and he brought forth the goblet.

It was a marvellous specimen of the most exquisite Venetian
workmanship. A pair of green serpents with eyes that glowed like fire
writhed around the golden stem of a blood-red bowl, and as the white
light of the cloudless sky fell on it from the broad window, it burned
in the glory of the sunshine and seemed to fill itself full of some
mysterious and royal wine. Shylock revolved it slowly in his hand to
show the strange waviness of its texture, and as it turned, the
serpents clung more closely to the stem and arched their heads and
shot a glance of hate at the strangers who came to gaze on them with
curious fascination.

John Manning looked at the goblet long and eagerly. "How did it come
into your possession?" he asked.

And Jessica translated Shylock's declaration that the goblet had been
at Murano for hundreds of yea