they halted. So they all decided that the Cross must not follow the procession, and thereupon it instantly became light again, and was carried back to the chapel of Saint John the Evangelist.
The fireside is the natural place for telling stories, and there is certainly some connection in the human mind between firelight and the fabulous. Dante tells that in his time the women of Venice consulted the fire in order to know the future. When a girl was engaged to be married she appealed to one of the burning logs, and decided from the augury whether she was to be happy or unhappy. Those who wanted money struck the log with the tongs, calling out softly, ‘Ducats! ducats!’ If the sparks flew out abundantly there was some hope that a rich relation might die and leave the inquirer a legacy. When the sparks were few and faint, poverty was prophesied.
Unlike all other Italians, who believe that hunchbacks bring good luck, the Venetians feared them excessively. A Venetian proverb says, ‘Leave three steps between thyself and those whom God has marked, eight if it is a hunchback, and twenty-eight if the man be lame.’
One of the pretty superstitions of Venetian mothers was that if they took their little children out before dawn on Saint John’s Day, the twenty-fourth of June, so that the morning dew might dampen their cheeks and hair, they would have lovely complexions and golden locks. There are old Venetian lullabies that promise babies the midsummer dew.
RIO S. SOFIA, NIGHT
IX
THE DECADENCE
The seventeenth century, like the fourteenth, was one of transition; but whereas the earlier period was one of improvement, the latter was one of decay. When time at last began to do its work upon the Republic, Venice had been independent nine hundred years; she was still at the height of her glory, still in the magnificence of her outward splendour, but the long-strained machinery of government was beginning to wear out. At the commencement of the seventeenth century all Italy seemed to be threatened by war; the peace
1598. Rom. vii. 5.
patched up between Philip II. of Spain and Henry IV. of France at Vervins had been of an unsatisfactory and precarious nature; the Holy See was more and more on its guard against the Protestant powers, and Spain took advantage of this in order to sow discord between the court of Rome and other governments. Venice was especially involved in these difficulties, because she had signed in 1589 a commercial treaty with the Grisons which had greatly displeased Spain, the latter being then in