“What do you think it cost his Highness the next day, Professor?” I asked.
“I never heard,” he replied, with a shrug of his shoulders; “but what did it matter? what are kings for?”
“Good-night!”
LIFE IN THE STREETS
THE gondola, like all other cabs, land or water, whether hansom, four-wheeler, sampan, or caïque, is a luxury used only by the hurried and the rich. As no Venetian is ever hurried, and few are rich,—very many of them living in complete ignorance of the exact whereabouts of their next repast,—almost everybody walks.
And the walking, strange to say, in this city anchored miles out at sea, with nearly every street paved with ripples, is particularly good. Of course, one must know the way,—the way out of the broad Campo, down the narrow slit of a street between tall houses; the way over the slender bridges, along stone foot-walks, hardly a yard wide, bracketed to some palace wall overhanging the water, or the way down a flight of steps dipping into a doorway and so under and through a greater house held up by stone columns, and on into the open again.
But when you do know all these twists and turns and crookednesses, you are surprised to find that you can walk all over Venice and never wet the sole of your shoe, nor even soil it, for that matter.
If you stand on the Iron Bridge spanning the Grand Canal,—the only dry-shod connection between the new part of Venice which lies along the Zattere, and the old section about San Marco and the Piazza,—you will find it crowded all day with hundreds of pedestrians passing to and fro. Some of them have come from away down near the Arsenal, walked the whole length of the Riva, rounded the Campanile, crossed the Piazza, and then twisted themselves through a tangle of these same little byways and about church corners and down dark cellars,—sotto porticos, the street labels call them,—until they have reached the Campo of San Stefano and the Iron Bridge. And it is so, too, at the Rialto, the only other bridge, but one, crossing the Grand Canal, except that the stream of idlers has here a different current and poorer clothes are seen. Many of these streets are wide enough for a company of soldiers to walk abreast, and many are so narrow that when two fruit venders pass with their baskets, one of them steps into a doorway.
And the people one meets in these twists and turns,—the people who live in the big and little streets,—who eat, sleep, and are merry, and who, in the warm summer days and nights, seem to have no other homes! My dear friend Luigi is one of these vagrant Bohemians, and so is Vittorio, and little Appo, with shoulders like a stone Hercules and quite as hard, and so, also, are Antonio and the rest. When Luigi wants his breakfast he eats it from a scrap of paper held on the palm of his hand, upon which is puddled and heaped a little mound of thick soup or brown ragout made of fulpe, or perhaps shreds of fish. He will eat this as he walks, stopping to talk to every fellow-tramp he meets, each one of whom dips in his thumb and forefinger with a pinch-of-snuff movement quite in keeping with the ancient custom and equally as courteous. Every other poverty-stricken cavalière of the Riva, as soon as he has loaded down his own palm with a similar greasy mess from the earthen dish simmering over a charcoal fire,—the open-air caffè of the poor,—expects that the next friend passing will do the same. When night comes they each select some particularly soft slab of marble on one of the seats in the shadow of the Campanile, or some bricked recess behind San Marco, stuff their hats under their cheeks, and drop into oblivion, only waking to life when the sun touches the gilded angel of San Giorgio. And not only Luigi and his fellow-tramps,—delightful fellows every one of them, and dear particular friends of mine,—but hundreds of others of every class and condition of royal, irredeemable, irresponsible, never-ending poverty.