"Certainly. Why not?" he replied. "I could not bring myself to staying in a hotel, Phil, in Venice. Venice is of a past age, when hotels were not, and to be thoroughly en rapport with my surroundings, I took up my abode in a palace, as I have said. It was on one of the side streets, to be sure, but it was yet a palace, and a beautiful one. And that street! It was a rivulet of beauty, in which could be seen myriads of golden-hued fish at play, which as the gondola passed to and fro would flirt into hiding until the intruder had passed out of sight in the Grand Canal, after which they would come slowly back again to render the silver waters almost golden with their brilliance."
"Weren't you rather extravagant, Tom?" I asked. "Palaces are costly, are they not?"
"Oh no," he replied, with as much gravity as though he had really taken the trip and was imparting information to a seeker after knowledge. "It was not extravagant when you consider that anything in Venice in the way of a habitable house is called a palace, and that there are no servants to be tipped; that your lights, candles all, cost you first price only, and not the profit of the landlord, plus that of the concierge, plus that of the maid, plus several other small but aggravatingly augmentative sums which make your hotel bills seem like highway robbery. No, living in a palace, on the whole, is cheaper than living in a hotel; incidentals are less numerous and not so costly; and then you are so independent. Mine was a particularly handsome structure. I believe I have a picture of it here."
Here Bragdon fumbled in his satchel for a moment, and then dragged forth a small unmounted photograph of a Venetian street scene, and, pointing out an ornate structure at the left of the picture, assured me that that was his palace, though he had forgotten the name of it.
"By-the-way," he said, "let me say parenthetically that I think our foreign trips will have a far greater vraisemblance if we heighten the illusion with a few photographs, don't you? They cost about a quarter apiece at Blank's, in Twenty-third Street."
"A good idea that," I answered, amused at the thoroughness with which Bragdon was "doing" Venice. "We can remember what we haven't seen so very much more easily."
"Yes," Bragdon said, "and besides, they'll keep us from exaggeration."
And then he went on to tell me of his month in Venice; how he chartered a gondola for the whole of his stay there from a handsome romantic Venetian youth, whose name was on a card Tom had had printed for the occasion, reading:
GIUSEPPE ZOCCO
Gondolas at all Hours
Cor. Grand Canal and Garibaldi St.
"Giuseppe was a character," Bragdon said. "One of the remnants of a by-gone age. He could sing like a bird, and at night he used to bring his friends around to the front of my palace and hitch up to one of the piles that were driven beside my doorstep, and there they'd sing their soft Italian melodies for me by the hour. It was better than Italian opera, and only cost me ten dollars for the whole season."