The ball opened, and now we were much besought by the ladies.  I had to deny myself with a whole series of comical excuses.  Eustace performed his duty after a stiff English fashion—­once with his pretty partner of the pranzo, and once again with a fat gondolier.  The band played waltzes and polkas, chiefly upon patriotic airs—­the Marcia Reale, Garibaldi’s Hymn, &c.  Men danced with men, women with women, little boys and girls together.  The gallery whirled with a laughing crowd.  There was plenty of excitement and enjoyment—­not an unseemly or extravagant word or gesture.  My comare careered about with a light maenadic impetuosity, which made me regret my inability to accept her pressing invitations.  She pursued me into every corner of the room, but when at last I dropped excuses and told her that my real reason for not dancing was that it would hurt my health, she waived her claims at once with an Ah, poverino!

Some time after midnight we felt that we had had enough of divertimento.  Francesco helped us to slip out unobserved.  With many silent good wishes we left the innocent playful people who had been so kind to us.  The stars were shining from a watery sky as we passed into the piazza beneath the Campanile and the pinnacles of S. Mark.  The Riva was almost empty, and the little waves fretted the boats moored to the piazzetta, as a warm moist breeze went fluttering by.  We smoked a last cigar, crossed our traghetto, and were soon sound asleep at the end of a long pleasant day.  The ball, we heard next morning, finished about four.

Since that evening I have had plenty of opportunities for seeing my friends the gondoliers, both in their own homes and in my apartment.  Several have entertained me at their mid-day meal of fried fish and amber-coloured polenta.  These repasts were always cooked with scrupulous cleanliness, and served upon a table covered with coarse linen.  The polenta is turned out upon a wooden platter, and cut with a string called lassa.  You take a large slice of it on the palm of the left hand, and break it with the fingers of the right.  Wholesome red wine of the Paduan district and good white bread were never wanting.  The rooms in which we met to eat looked out on narrow lanes or over pergolas of yellowing vines.  Their whitewashed walls were hung with photographs of friends and foreigners, many of them souvenirs from English or American employers.  The men, in broad black hats and lilac shirts, sat round the table, girt with the red waist-wrapper, or fascia, which marks the ancient faction of the Castellani.  The other faction, called Nicolotti, are distinguished by a black assisa.  The quarters of the town are divided unequally and irregularly into these two parties.  What was once a formidable rivalry between two sections of the Venetian populace, still survives in challenges to trials of strength and skill upon the water.  The women, in their many-coloured