delights of the
day.

This third and last event pleasantly ended their sojourn at Albano; for
a day or two later they vanished, leaving the dear officers
disconsolate till the next batch of travelling ladies came to comfort
their despair.

A week was spent in Venice, floating about all day from one delightful
old church to another, or paying visits to Titians and Tintorettos;
buying little turtles, photographs, or Venetian glass; eating candied
fruit and seeing the doves fed in the square of San Marco; visiting
shops full of dusty antiquities, or searching the stalls on the Rialto
for Moor's-head rings; being rowed to the Lido by Giacomo in a red sash;
and lulled to sleep at night by the songs of a chorus that floated under
the windows in the moonlight.

Lavinia never could get used to seeing the butcher, the baker, and the
postman go their rounds in boats. Matilda was in bliss, with a gondola
all to herself, where she sat surrounded with water-colours, trying to
paint everything she saw; for here the energy she had lost at Rome
seemed to return to her. Amanda haunted a certain shop, trying to make
the man take a reasonable sum for a very ancient and ugly bit of
jewellery, which she called 'a sprigalario,' for want of a better name;
and after each failure she went off to compose herself with a visit to
the Doges.

Of course they all saw the Bridge of Sighs and the dungeons below, with
their many horrors; likewise a Mass at St. Mark's, where the Patriarch
was a fat old soul in red silk, even to his shoes and holy
pocket-handkerchief; and the service appeared to consist in six purple
priests dressing and undressing him like an old doll, while a dozen
white-gowned boys droned up in a gold cock-loft, and many beggars whined
on the dirty floor below.

Do other travellers eat locusts, I wonder, as ours did one sunny day,
sitting on church steps, and discover that the food of the Apostle was
not the insect whose 'zeeing' foretells hot weather; but the long, dry
pods of the locust-tree, sweet to the taste, but rather 'dry fodder,' as
the impious Livy remarked after choking herself with a quarter of a yard
of it.

When the week was up Mat implored to be left behind with Angela, the
maid, and Brio, a big poodle possessed of the devil. But she was torn
away, and only consoled by the promise of many new gloves, with as many
buttons as she pleased, when they got to Munich.

'The lakes are the proper entrance into Italy, an