On the staircase on each side are beautiful statutes and columns, elaborate carving and richly colored marbles. The Hall of the Great Council is one hundred and seventy-five feet long and most a hundred in width, broad enough and high enough to entertain broader and nobler views than wuz promulgated there. But it contains costly and beautiful pictures; one by Tintoretto is eighty-four feet wide and most forty feet high, the largest picture on canvas in the world so I’ve hearn, and others by Paul Veronese and the other great masters.
All round the wall, like a border in a Jonesville parlor, are the portraits of the Doges of Venice in their red robes and round-topped caps. But where Marino Faliero should have hung wuz a black curtain. Well, he wuz a mean creeter; it is a good thing he can be shut out with a curtain. Josiah said he thought it would be a crackin’ good plan to have a black curtain hung before the pictures of some of our public men, but Arvilly said, in a real dry tone, that “If we begun that it would bring up the price of black cloth enormously.”
She mourns yet quite a good deal in her best dresses, and looked ahead, and didn’t want the price of crape and bombazine riz.
Among the pictures of these old Doges wuz one who led the army in an attack on Constantinople at the age of ninety-seven, when most old men are bedrid with a soap-stun and water gruel. And Francesco Foscari, who worked nobly for thirty-five years and wuz then abused shameful by the Ten and turned out of office.
Them old Doges had their ups and downs; riz up to power, throwed down agin. Mean as the Old Harry, some on ’em, and some workin’ well for the public. And some after servin’ the public for years wuz banished, some beheaded, some had their eyes put out, one died of vexation, one who wuz deposed died when the bell rung in his successor. A few died in battle, but only a few on ’em passed away in their beds after a lingerin’ and honorable sickness with their one wife and children weepin’ about ’em.
You can see the open place in the wall where the written complaints wuz put aginst somebody or anybody, guilty or innocent, and wuz pretty sure to be acted upon by the dretful Ten settin’ there in their black robes and black masks, fit color for their dark and cruel deeds.
We went down to see the dungeons, dark, cramped, filthy holes in the solid wall: only a little light sifted in from the corridor through a narrow slit. It seemed as if them places wuz so awful we couldn’t bear to look at ’em. But we went down into still deeper dungeons way below the canal, dretful places where you can’t hardly draw a breath. We see dim traces of writings on the walls some wretched prisoner waitin’ for death had writ there. How did he feel when he writ it? I didn’t want to know, nor have Josiah know.
We didn’t make a very long stay in Venice, but journeyed on to Florence––Florence the beautiful. It lays in a quiet, sheltered valley with the Apennine Mountains risin’ about it as if to keep off danger. The river Arno runs through it, spanned by handsome bridges. The old wall that used to surround it with its eight gates, has been destroyed some years ago.