The morning has not lost its freshness.  Antelao and Tofana, guarding the vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst.  Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky.  There are men dredging for shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb.  Nothing can be lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than this tranquil, sunny expanse of the lagoon.  As we round the point of the Bersaglio, new landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland move into sight at every slow stroke of the oar.  A luggage-train comes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue.  Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for the trains.  Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio.  They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenth century.  From these and from a few rosy fragments on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading figures in a certain courtyard near San Stefano, we form some notion how Venice looked when all her palaces were painted.  Pictures by Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of restoration.  And here and there, in back canals, we come across coloured sections of old buildings, capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a moment seem to realise our dream.

A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning with Carpaccio or Bellini.  But space is wanting in these pages.  Nor would it suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palaces and churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellow panellings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or the delicacy of their shallow chiselled traceries in cream-white Istrian stone.  It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasant pilgrimage:  warrior angels of Vivarini and Basaiti hidden in a dark chapel of the Frari; Fra Francesco’s fantastic orchard of fruits and flowers in distant S. Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Bellini in S. Zaccaria; Palma’s majestic S. Barbara in S. Maria Formosa; San Giobbe’s wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full of mediaeval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy.

Bather than prolong this list, I will tell a story which drew me one day past the Public Gardens to the metropolitan Church of Venice, San Pietro di Castello.  The novella is related by Bandello.  It has, as will be noticed, points of similarity to that of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’

V.—­A VENETIAN NOVELLA