The porter bowed low as the gondola pushed off, and Giovanni leaned back in the comfortable seat, to repeat again and again in his mind what he meant to say if he succeeded in speaking with the Governor.  He had his letter of complaint safe in his wallet, and he could remember every word he had written.  In order to go to Venice, the nearest way was to return from the Grand Canal of Murano by the canal of San Piero, and to pass the glass-house.  The door was shut as usual, and Giovanni smiled as he thought of how the city archers would go in, perhaps that very night, to take Zorzi away.  He would not be with them, but when they were gone, he would go and find the book under one of the stones.  When he had got it, his father might come home, for all Giovanni cared.

Before long the gondola was winding its way through the narrow canals, now shooting swiftly along a short straight stretch, between a monastery and a palace, now brought to by a turn of the hand at a corner, as the man at the oar shouted out a direction meant for whoever might be coming, by the right or left, as one should say “starboard helm” or “port helm,” and both doing the same, two vessels pass clear of one another; and to this day the gondoliers of Venice use the old words, and tell long-winded stories of their derivation and first meaning, which seem quite unnecessary.  But in Beroviero’s time, the gondola had only lately come into fashion, and every one adopted it quickly because it was much cheaper than keeping horses, and it was far more pleasant to be taken quickly by water, by shorter ways, than to ride in the narrow streets, in the mud in winter and in the dust in summer, jostling those who walked, and sometimes quarrelling with those who rode, because the way was too narrow for one horse to pass another, when both had riders on their backs.  Moreover, it was law that after nine o’clock in the morning no man who had reached the fig-tree that grew in the open space before San Salvatore, should ride to Saint Mark’s by the Merceria, so that people had to walk the rest of the way, leaving their horses to grooms.  The gondola was therefore a great convenience, besides being a notable economy, and old Francesco Sansovino says that in his day, which was within a lifetime of Angelo Beroviero’s, there were nine or ten thousand gondolas in Venice.  But at first they had not the high peaked stem of iron, and stem and stern were made almost alike, as in the Venetian boats and skiffs of our own time.

Giovanni got out at the steps of the Contarini palace, which, of the many that even then belonged to different branches of that great house, was distinguished above all others by its marvellous outer winding staircase, which still stands in all its beauty and slender grace.  But near the great palace there were little wooden houses of two stories, some new and straight and gaily painted, but some old and crooked, hanging over the canals so that they seemed ready to topple down, with