Here we overtake boats on the way to the Rialto market, some hastening with oars, others allowing their yellow sails to do the work, heaped high with vegetables and fruit. Just off the mud the sardine catchers are at work, waist high in the water.

The sun has now gone, the sky is burning brighter and brighter, and Venice is to be seen: either between her islands or peeping over them. S. Spirito, now a powder magazine, we pass, and S. Clemente, with its barrack-like red buildings, once a convent and now a refuge for poor mad women, and then La Grazia, where the consumptives are sent, and so we enter the narrow way between the Giudecca and S. Giorgio Maggiore, on the other side of which Venice awaits us in all her twilight loveliness. And disembarking we are glad to be at home again. For even an afternoon's absence is like an act of treachery.

And here, re-entering Venice in the way in which, in the first chapter, I advised all travellers to get their first sight of her, I come to an end, only too conscious of how ridiculous is the attempt to write a single book on this city. Where many books could not exhaust the theme, what chance has only one? At most it can say and say again (like "all of the singing") how it was good!

Venice needs a whole library to describe her: a book on her churches and a book on her palaces; a book on her painters and a book on her sculptors; a book on her old families and a book on her new; a book on her builders and a book on her bridges; a book—but why go on? The fact is self-evident.

Yet there is something that a single book can do: it can testify to delight received and endeavour to kindle an enthusiasm in others; and that I may perhaps have done.

INDEX