followed by boiled turbot or fried soles, beefsteak or mutton cutlets, tordi or beccafichi, with a salad, the whole enlivened with good red wine or Florio’s Sicilian Marsala from the cask, costs about four francs.  Gas is unknown in the establishment.  There is no noise, no bustle, no brutality of waiters, no ahurissement of tourists.  And when dinner is done, we can sit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking until the night invites us to a stroll along the Zattere or a giro in the gondola.

IX.—­NIGHT IN VENICE

Night in Venice!  Night is nowhere else so wonderful, unless it be in winter among the high Alps.  But the nights of Venice and the nights of the mountains are too different in kind to be compared.

There is the ever-recurring miracle of the full moon rising, before day is dead, behind San Giorgio, spreading a path of gold on the lagoon which black boats traverse with the glow-worm lamp upon their prow; ascending the cloudless sky and silvering the domes of the Salute; pouring vitreous sheen upon the red lights of the Piazzetta; flooding the Grand Canal, and lifting the Rialto higher in ethereal whiteness; piercing but penetrating not the murky labyrinth of rio linked with rio, through which we wind in light and shadow, to reach once more the level glories and the luminous expanse of heaven beyond the Misericordia.

This is the melodrama of Venetian moonlight; and if a single impression of the night has to be retained from one visit to Venice, those are fortunate who chance upon a full moon of fair weather.  Yet I know not whether some quieter and soberer effects are not more thrilling.  To-night, for example, the waning moon will rise late through veils of scirocco.  Over the bridges of San Cristoforo and San Gregorio, through the deserted Calle di Mezzo, my friend and I walk in darkness, pass the marble basements of the Salute, and push our way along its Riva to the point of the Dogana.  We are out at sea alone, between the Canalozzo and the Giudecca.  A moist wind ruffles the water and cools our forehead.  It is so dark that we can only see San Giorgio by the light reflected on it from the Piazzetta.  The same light climbs the Campanile of S. Mark, and shows the golden angel in a mystery of gloom.  The only noise that reaches us is a confused hum from the Piazza.  Sitting and musing there, the blackness of the water whispers in our ears a tale of death.  And now we hear a plash of oars, and gliding through the darkness comes a single boat.  One man leaps upon the landing-place without a word and disappears.  There is another wrapped in a military cloak asleep.  I see his face beneath me, pale and quiet.  The barcaruolo turns the point in silence.  From the darkness they came; into the darkness they have gone.  It is only an ordinary incident of coastguard service.  But the spirit of the night has made a poem of it.