hold on the traghetto.  One is to this effect:  il traghetto e un buon padrone.  The other satirises the meanness of the poverty-stricken Venetian nobility:  pompa di servitu, misera insegna.  When they combine the traghetto with private service, the municipality insists on their retaining the number painted on their gondola; and against this their employers frequently object.  It is therefore a great point for a gondolier to make such an arrangement with his master as will leave him free to show his number.  The reason for this regulation is obvious.  Gondoliers are known more by their numbers and their traghetti than their names.  They tell me that though there are upwards of a thousand registered in Venice, each man of the trade knows the whole confraternity by face and number.  Taking all things into consideration, I think four francs a day the whole year round are very good earnings for a gondolier.  On this he will marry and rear a family, and put a little money by.  A young unmarried man, working at two and a half or three francs a day, is proportionately well-to-do.  If he is economical, he ought upon these wages to save enough in two or three years to buy himself a gondola.  A boy from fifteen to nineteen is called a mezz’ uomo, and gets about one franc a day.  A new gondola with all its fittings is worth about a thousand francs.  It does not last in good condition more than six or seven years.  At the end of that time the hull will fetch eighty francs.  A new hull can be had for three hundred francs.  The old fittings—­brass sea-horses or cavalli, steel prow or ferro, covered cabin or felze, cushions and leather-covered back-board or stramazetto, maybe transferred to it.  When a man wants to start a gondola, he will begin by buying one already half past service—­a gondola da traghetto or di mezza eta.  This should cost him something over two hundred francs.  Little by little, he accumulates the needful fittings; and when his first purchase is worn out, he hopes to set up with a well-appointed equipage.  He thus gradually works his way from the rough trade which involves hard work and poor earnings to that more profitable industry which cannot be carried on without a smart boat.  The gondola is a source of continual expense for repairs.  Its oars have to be replaced.  It has to be washed with sponges, blacked, and varnished.  Its bottom needs frequent cleaning.  Weeds adhere to it in the warm brackish water, growing rapidly through the summer months, and demanding to be scrubbed off once in every four weeks.  The gondolier has no place where he can do this for himself.  He therefore takes his boat to a wharf, or squero, as the place is called.  At these squeri gondolas are built as well as cleaned.  The fee for a thorough setting to rights of the boat is five francs.  It must be done upon a fine day.  Thus in addition to the cost, the owner loses a good day’s work.