The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a
fit subject for flippant speech or the idle gossiping
of tourists. It seems a sort of sacrilege to disturb
the glamour of old romance that pictures her to
us softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and
curtains her ruin and her desolation from our view.
One ought, indeed, to turn away from her rags, her
poverty, and her humiliation, and think of her only
as she was when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne;
when she humbled Frederick Barbarossa or waved
her victorious banners above the battlements of
Constantinople.

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and
entered a hearse belonging to the Grand Hotel
d'Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse
than anything else, though, to speak by the card, it
was a gondola. And this was the storied gondola
of Venice!--the fairy boat in which the princely
cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the
waters of the moonlit canals and look the eloquence
of love into the soft eyes of patrician beauties, while
the gay gondolier in silken doublet touched his
guitar and sang as only gondoliers can sing! This
the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier!
--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable
hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the
other a mangy, barefooted gutter-snipe with a por-
tion of his raiment on exhibition which should have
been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he
turned a corner and shot his hearse into a dismal
ditch between two long rows of towering, untenanted
buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to

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