frugal Venetian fashion, even if I had been
disposed to remain a foreigner in everything.
Of bachelor lodgings I had sufficient expe-
rience during my first year; but as most
prudent travellers who visit the city for a
week take lodgings, I need not describe my
own particularly. You can tell the houses
in which there are rooms to let by the squares
of white paper fastened to the window-shut-
ters; and a casual glance as you pass through
the streets gives you the idea that the chief
income of the place is derived from letting
lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the
rooms usually are, with an uncompromising
squareness of prints upon the wall, an ap-
palling breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness
of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of sofa never,
never to be dissociated in their victim's
mind from the idea of the villainous hard
bread of Venice on which the gloomy land-
lady sustains her life with its immutable
purposes of plunder. Flabbiness without
softness is the tone of these discouraging
chambers, which are dear or not according
to the season and the situation. On the
sunlit Riva during winter, and on the Grand
Canal in summer, they are costly enough,
but they are to be found on nearly all the

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