Then we rose, and wandered through the Jews’ cemetery.  It is a quiet place, where the flat grave-stones, inscribed in Hebrew and Italian, lie deep in Lido sand, waved over with wild grass and poppies.  I would fain believe that no neglect, but rather the fashion of this folk, had left the monuments of generations to be thus resumed by nature.  Yet, knowing nothing of the history of this burial-ground, I dare not affirm so much.  There is one outlying piece of the cemetery which seems to contradict my charitable interpretation.  It is not far from San Nicoletto.  No enclosure marks it from the unconsecrated dunes.  Acacia-trees sprout amid the monuments, and break the tablets with their thorny shoots upthrusting from the soil.  Where patriarchs and rabbis sleep for centuries, the fishers of the sea now wander, and defile these habitations of the dead: 

  Corruption most abhorred
  Mingling itself with their renowned ashes.

Some of the grave-stones have been used to fence the towing-path; and one I saw, well carved with letters legible of Hebrew on fair Istrian marble, which roofed an open drain leading from the stable of a Christian dog.

VIII.—­A VENETIAN RESTAURANT

At the end of a long glorious day, unhappy is that mortal whom the Hermes of a cosmopolitan hotel, white-chokered and white-waistcoated, marshals to the Hades of the table-d’hote.  The world has often been compared to an inn; but on my way down to this common meal I have, not unfrequently, felt fain to reverse the simile.  From their separate stations, at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flit to a gloomy gas-lit chamber.  They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares.  Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—­[Greek:  hadou mageiros]—­cook of the Inferno.  And just as we are told that in Charon’s boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide.  An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin’s handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a gondola from the railway station; a German shopkeeper descanting in one breath on Baur’s Bock and the beauties of the Marcusplatz; an intelligent aesthete bent on working into clearness his own views of Carpaccio’s genius:  all these in turn, or all together, must be suffered gladly through well-nigh two long hours.  Uncomforted in soul we rise from the expensive banquet; and how often rise from it unfed!