Even tempestuous and rainy weather, though melancholy enough, is never sordid here.  There is no noise from carriage traffic in Venice, and the sea-wind preserves the purity and transparency of the atmosphere.  It had been raining all day, but at evening came a partial clearing.  I went down to the Molo, where the large reach of the lagoon was all moon-silvered, and San Giorgio Maggiore dark against the bluish sky, and Santa Maria della Salute domed with moon-irradiated pearl, and the wet slabs of the Riva shimmering in moonlight, the whole misty sky, with its clouds and stellar spaces, drenched in moonlight, nothing but moonlight sensible except the tawny flare of gas-lamps and the orange lights of gondolas afloat upon the waters.  On such a night the very spirit of Venice is abroad.  We feel why she is called Bride of the Sea.

Take yet another night.  There had been a representation of Verdi’s ‘Forza del Destino’ at the Teatro Malibran.  After midnight we walked homeward through the Merceria, crossed the Piazza, and dived into the narrow calle which leads to the traghetto of the Salute.  It was a warm moist starless night, and there seemed no air to breathe in those narrow alleys.  The gondolier was half asleep.  Eustace called him as we jumped into his boat, and rang our soldi on the gunwale.  Then he arose and turned the ferro round, and stood across towards the Salute.  Silently, insensibly, from the oppression of confinement in the airless streets to the liberty and immensity of the water and the night we passed.  It was but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and left the ferryman.  But in that brief passage he had opened our souls to everlasting things—­the freshness, and the darkness, and the kindness of the brooding, all-enfolding night above the sea.

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THE GONDOLIER’S WEDDING

The night before the wedding we had a supper-party in my rooms.  We were twelve in all.  My friend Eustace brought his gondolier Antonio with fair-haired, dark-eyed wife, and little Attilio, their eldest child.  My own gondolier, Francesco, came with his wife and two children.  Then there was the handsome, languid Luigi, who, in his best clothes, or out of them, is fit for any drawing-room.  Two gondoliers, in dark blue shirts, completed the list of guests, if we exclude the maid Catina, who came and went about the table, laughing and joining in the songs, and sitting down at intervals to take her share of wine.  The big room looking across the garden to the Grand Canal had been prepared for supper; and the company were to be received in the smaller, which has a fine open space in front of it to southwards.  But as the guests arrived, they seemed to find the kitchen and the cooking that was going on quite irresistible.  Catina, it seems, had lost her head with so many cuttlefishes, orai, cakes, and fowls, and cutlets to reduce