I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of the cross.  I hope it will do you good.  Also, I have been up among the galleries of St. Mark’s, and about the roof and the west front where somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.

The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate every time we come.  I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they take or spill.  They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian beggars—­and the cleanest.

Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday:  I think less for the sake of giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself.  I have no idea for measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed roof, windows at each end, and portieres along the walls of old blue Venetian linen:  a place in which it seems one could only live and think nobly.  His face seems to respond to its teachings.  What more might not an environment like that bring out in you?  Come and let me see!  I have hopes springing as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph.  Then I am more blessed even than I knew.  What, you are coming?  So well I do love you, my Beloved!

LETTER XLI.

Dearest:  This letter will travel with me:  we leave to-day.  Our movements are to be too restless and uncomfortable for the next few days for me to have a chance of quiet seeing or quiet writing anywhere.  At Riva we shall rest, I hope.

Yesterday a storm began coming over towards evening, and I thought to myself that if it passed in time there should be a splendid sunset of smolder and glitter to be seen from the Campanile, and perhaps by good chance a rainbow.

I went alone:  when I got to the top the rain was pelting hard; so there I stayed happily weather-bound for an hour looking over Venice “silvered with slants of rain,” and watching umbrellas scuttering below with toes beneath them.  The golden smolder was very slow in coming:  it lay over the mainland and came creeping along the railway track.  Then came the glitter and the sun, and I turned round and found my rainbow.  But it wasn’t a bow, it was a circle:  the Campanile stood up as it were a spoke in the middle,—­the lower curve of the rainbow lay on the ground of the Piazzetta, cut off sharp by the shadow of the Campanile.  It was worth waiting an hour to see.  The islands shone mellow and bright in the clearance with the storm going off black behind them.  Good-by, Venice!

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