And all along the Grand Canal the palaces swayed helpless, tottering to their fall, while boats piled high with men and women strove to stem the tide, and save themselves from those impending ruins.  It was a mad dream, born of the sea’s roar and Tintoretto’s painting.  But this afternoon no such visions are suggested.  The sea sleeps, and in the moist autumn air we break tall branches of the seeded yellowing samphire from hollows of the rocks, and bear them homeward in a wayward bouquet mixed with cobs of Indian-corn.

Fusina is another point for these excursions.  It lies at the mouth of the Canal di Brenta, where the mainland ends in marsh and meadows, intersected by broad renes.  In spring the ditches bloom with fleurs-de-lys; in autumn they take sober colouring from lilac daisies and the delicate sea-lavender.  Scores of tiny plants are turning scarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes.  Purple, violet, and rose are spread around us.  In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice—­a long low broken line, touched with the softest roseate flush.  Ere we reach the Giudecca on our homeward way, sunset has faded.  The western skies have clad themselves in green, barred with dark fire-rimmed clouds.  The Euganean hills stand like stupendous pyramids, Egyptian, solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon.  The far reaches of the lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tones of glowing lilac which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening.  Then, at last, we see the first lamps glitter on the Zattere.  The quiet of the night has come.

Words cannot be formed to express the endless varieties of Venetian sunset.  The most magnificent follow after wet stormy days, when the west breaks suddenly into a labyrinth of fire, when chasms of clear turquoise heavens emerge, and horns of flame are flashed to the zenith, and unexpected splendours scale the fretted clouds, step over step, stealing along the purple caverns till the whole dome throbs.  Or, again, after a fair day, a change of weather approaches, and high, infinitely high, the skies are woven over with a web of half-transparent cirrus-clouds.  These in the afterglow blush crimson, and through their rifts the depth of heaven is of a hard and gemlike blue, and all the water turns to rose beneath them.  I remember one such evening on the way back from Torcello.  We were well out at sea between Mazzorbo and Murano.  The ruddy arches overhead were reflected without interruption in the waveless ruddy lake below.  Our black boat was the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour.  We seemed to hang suspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose.  Yet not these melodramatic