Floating in a gondola on the Grand Canal of Venice is a beautiful experience when the soft light of the moon and stars is restin’ on the stately old marble palaces, the tall pillars of St. Theodore and the Winged Lion, obelisk and spire. With other gondolas all about you, you seem to be on a sea of glory, with anon music from afar coming sweetly to your ears from some gondola or palace, and far up some narrow water street opens with long shafts of light flashing from the gondolier’s lantern or open window. It is all a seen of enchantment.
Though if you should foller up some of them narrow water streets by daylight, you would see and smell things that would roust you up from your dream. You would see old boats unloadin’ vegetables, taking on garbage, water-boats pumpin’ water into some house, wine shops, cook shops; you would see dilapidated houses with poorly clad people standin’ in the doorways; ragged, unkempt children looking down on you from broken windows, and about all the sights you see in all the poorer streets of any city, though here you see it from a boat instead of from a hack or trolley car. Green mould would be seen clinging to the walls, and you would see things in the water that ortn’t to be throwed there.
Moonlight and memory rares up its glittering walls, but reality and the searchin’ life of the present tears ’em down. Where are the three thousand warships, the three thousand merchant ships, that carried the wealth and greatness of Venice back in the fifteenth century; fifty-two thousand sailors, a thousand nobles and citizens and working people according? Gone, gone! Floated way off out of that Grand Canal and disappeared in the mists and shadows of the past, and you have to go back there to see ’em.
The Rialto, which we had dremp about, looked beautiful from the water, with its one single arch of ninety-one feet lifting up six arches on each side. But come to walk acrost its broad space you find it is divided into narrow streets, where you can buy anything from a crown to a string of beads, from macaroni to a china teapot.
The great square of St. Mark wuz a pleasant place on an evening. Little tables set out in the street, with gayly-dressed people laughing and talking and taking light refreshments and listening to the music of the band, and a gay crowd walking to and fro, and picturesque venders showing their goods.
But to Tommy nothing wuz so pretty as the doves of St. Mark, who come down to be fed at two o’clock, descending through the blue sky like a shower of snow.
The Campanile or bell-tower towers up more than three hundred feet above the pavement; way up on the tower two bronze statutes stand with hammers and strikes off the hours. Why is it that the doves pay no attention to any other hour they may strike but when the hour of two sounds out, a window on the north side of the square opens and some grain is thrown out to ’em (the Government throws it to ’em, dretful good natered to think on’t)? But how did them doves know two from three? I d’no nor Josiah don’t. I had provided Tommy with some food for ’em and they flowed down and lighted on him and Dorothy, who also fed ’em; it wuz a pretty sight. And Robert Strong thought so too, I could read it in 338 his eyes as he looked at Dorothy with the pretty doves on her shoulder and white hands.
I got some sooveneers for the children at Venice, some little ivory gondolas and photographs, etc., and Miss Meechim and Dorothy got sights of things, Venetian jewelry, handsome as could be, and Arvilly got a little present for Waitstill and a jet handkerchief pin for herself. She mourns yet on the inside and outside, yes, indeed! and I d’no but she always will.
And as you can git a relic of most everything at some of the shops I told Josiah I would love to git hold of one of them old rings that the Doges married the Adriatic with. And if you’ll believe it that man didn’t like it; sez he real puggicky: