Thus it was that, from the moment momma put her head out of the car window, after Mestre, and exclaimed, “It’s getting wateryer and wateryer,” Venice was a source of the completest joy and satisfaction to both my parents.  Dicky and I took it with the more moderate appreciation natural to our years, but it gave us the greatest pleasure to watch the simple and unrestrained delight of momma and poppa, and to revert, as it were, in their experience, to what our own enjoyment might have been had we been born when they were.  “No express agents, no delivery carts, no baggage checks,” murmured poppa, as our trunks glided up to the hotel steps, “but it gets there all the same.”  This was the keynote of his admiration—­everything got there all the same.  The surprise of it was repeated every time anything got there, and was only dashed once when we saw brown-paper parcels being delivered by a boy at the back door of the Palazzo Balbi, who had evidently walked all the way.  The Senator commented upon that boy and his groceries as an inconsistency, and thereafter carefully closed his eyes to the fact that even our own hotel, which faced upon the Grand Canal, had communications to the rear by which its guests could explore a large part of commercial Venice without going in a gondola at all.  The canals were the only highways he would recognise, and he went three times to St. Maria della Salute, which was immediately opposite, for the sake of crossing the street in the Venetian way.  Momma became really hopeful about the stimulus to his imagination; she told him so.  “It appeals to you, Alexander,” she said.  “Its poetry comes home to you—­you needn’t deny it;” and poppa cordially admitted it.  “Yes,” he said, “Ruskin, according to the guide-book, doesn’t seem as if he could say too much about this city, and Bramley was just the same.  They’re both right, and if we were going to be here long enough I’d be like that myself.  There’s something about it that makes you willing to take a lot of trouble to describe it.  There’s no use saying it’s the canals, or the reflections in the water, or the bridges, or the pigeons, or the gargoyles, or the gondolas——­”

“Or Salviati, or Jesurum,” said momma, in lighter vein.

“Your memory, Augusta, for the names of old masters is perfectly wonderful,” continued poppa placidly.  “Or Salviati, or Jesurum, or what.  But there’s a kind of local spell about this place——­”

“There are various kinds of local smells,” interrupted Dicky, whom Mrs. Portheris still evaded, but this levity received no encouragement from the Senator.  He said instead that he hadn’t noticed them himself.  For his part he had come to Venice to use his eyes, not his nose; and Dicky, thus discouraged, faded visibly upon his stem.