“I am not an infant, my friend.  I’m a business man from Chicago.  It’s a business proposition.  Put your gondoliers into the styles they wore when Andrea Dandolo went looting Constantinople, and you’ll double your tourist traffic in five years.  Twice as many people wanting gondolas, wanting guides, wanting hotel accommodation, buying your coloured glass and lace flounces—­why, Great Scott! it would pay the city to do the thing at the public expense.  Then you could pass a by-law forbidding gondoliering to be done in any style later than the fifteenth century.  Pay you over and over again.”

Poppa was in earnest, he wanted it done.  He was only dissuaded from taking more active measures to make his idea public by the fact that he couldn’t stay to put it through.  He was told, of course, how the plain black gondola came to be enforced through the extravagance of the nobles who ruined themselves to have splendid ones, and how the Venetians scrupled to depart from a historic mandate, but he considered this a feeble argument, probably perpetuated by somebody who enjoyed a monopoly in supplying Venice with black paint.  “Circumstances alter cases,” he declared.  “If that old Doge knew that the P. and O. was going to run direct between Venice and Bombay every fortnight this year, he’d tell you to turn out your gondolas silver-gilt!”

Nevertheless, as I say, the Senator’s views were coldly received, with one exception.  A highly picturesque and intelligent gondolier, whom the guide sought to convert to a sense of the anachronism of his clothes in connection with his calling, promised that if we would give him a definite engagement for next day, he would appear suitably clad.  The following morning he awaited us with honest pride in his Sunday apparel, which included violently checked trousers, a hard felt hat, and a large pink tie.  The Senator paid him hurriedly and handsomely and dismissed him with as little injury to his feelings as was possible under the circumstances.  “Tell him,” said poppa to the guide, “to go home and take off those pants.  And tell him, do you understand, to rush!”

That same day, in the afternoon, I remember, when we were disembarking for an ice at Florian’s, momma directed our attention to two gentlemen in an approaching gondola.  “There’s something about that man,” she said impressively, “I mean the one in the duster, that belongs to the reign of Louis Philippe.”

“There is,” I responded; “we saw him last in the Petit Trianon.  It’s Mr. Pabbley and Mr. Hinkson.  Two more Transatlantic fellow-travellers.  Senator, when we meet them shall we greet them?”

The Senator had a moment of self-expostulation.

“Well, no,” he said, “I guess not.  I don’t suppose we need feel obliged to keep up the acquaintance of every American we come across in Europe.  It would take us all our time.  But I’d like to ask him what use he finds for a duster in Venice.”