kerchiefs, stirred polenta at the smoke-blackened chimney, whose huge pent-house roof projects two feet or more across the hearth.  When they had served the table they took their seat on low stools, knitted stockings, or drank out of glasses handed across the shoulder to them by their lords.  Some of these women were clearly notable housewives, and I have no reason to suppose that they do not take their full share of the housework.  Boys and girls came in and out, and got a portion of the dinner to consume where they thought best.  Children went tottering about upon the red-brick floor, the playthings of those hulking fellows, who handled them very gently and spoke kindly in a sort of confidential whisper to their ears.  These little ears were mostly pierced for earrings, and the light blue eyes of the urchins peeped maliciously beneath shocks of yellow hair.  A dog was often of the party.  He ate fish like his masters, and was made to beg for it by sitting up and rowing with his paws. Voga, Azzo, voga! The Anzolo who talked thus to his little brown Spitz-dog has the hoarse voice of a Triton and the movement of an animated sea-wave.  Azzo performed his trick, swallowed his fish-bones, and the fiery Anzolo looked round approvingly.

On all these occasions I have found these gondoliers the same sympathetic, industrious, cheery affectionate folk.  They live in many respects a hard and precarious life.  The winter in particular is a time of anxiety, and sometimes of privation, even to the well-to-do among them.  Work then is scarce, and what there is, is rendered disagreeable to them by the cold.  Yet they take their chance with facile temper, and are not soured by hardships.  The amenities of the Venetian sea and air, the healthiness of the lagoons, the cheerful bustle of the poorer quarters, the brilliancy of this Southern sunlight, and the beauty which is everywhere apparent, must be reckoned as important factors in the formation of their character.  And of that character, as I have said, the final note is playfulness.  In spite of difficulties, their life has never been stern enough to sadden them.  Bare necessities are marvellously cheap, and the pinch of real bad weather—­such frost as locked the lagoons in ice two years ago, or such south-western gales as flooded the basement floors of all the houses on the Zattere—­is rare and does not last long.  On the other hand, their life has never been so lazy as to reduce them to the savagery of the traditional Neapolitan lazzaroni.  They have had to work daily for small earnings, but under favourable conditions, and their labour has been lightened by much good-fellowship among themselves, by the amusements of their feste and their singing clubs.