The best or most entertaining panels seem to me the first, in which the little bald baby saint is being washed and his mother is being coaxed to eat something; the fourth, where we see the saint, now a youth, on his knees; the sixth, where he occupies the hermit’s cell and the hermit lets down food; the seventh, where the hermit and Benedict occupy the cell together and a huntsman and dog pursue their game above; the tenth, in the monastery; the twelfth, where the whip is being laid on; the fourteenth, with an especially good figure of Benedict; the sixteenth, where the meal is spread; the twentieth, with the devil on the tree trunk; the twenty-first, when the fire is being extinguished; the twenty-fifth, with soldiers in the distance; the twenty-seventh, with a fine cloaked figure; the twenty-eighth, where there is a struggle for a staff; the thirtieth, showing the dormitory and a cat and mouse; the thirty-second, a burial scene; the thirty-third, with its monsters; the thirty-sixth, in which the beggar is very good; the thirty-ninth, where the soldiers kiss the saint’s feet; and the forty-fourth, showing the service in the church and the soldiers’ arms piled up.

One would like to know more of this Albert de Brule and his work:  how long it took; why he did it; how it came to Venice; and so forth.  The date, which applies, I suppose, to the installation of the carvings, is 1598.

The other carvings are by other hands:  the S. George and dragon on the lectern in the choir, and the little courageous boys driving Behemoths on the stalls.

As one leaves the church by the central aisle the Dogana is seen framed by the doorway.  With each step more of Venice comes into view.  The Campanile is worth climbing for its lovely prospect.

From the little island of S. Giorgio it is but a stone’s throw to the larger island of the Giudecca, with its factories and warehouses and stevedores, and tiny cafes each with a bowling alley at the back.  The Giudecca, which looks so populous, is however only skin deep; almost immediately behind the long busy facade of the island are gardens, and then the shallow lagoon stretching for miles, where fishermen are mysteriously employed, day and night.  The gardens are restful rather than beautiful—­at least that one, open to visitors, on the Rio della Croce, may be thus described, for it is formal in its parallelograms divided by gritty paths, and its flowers are crudely coloured.  But it has fine old twisted mulberry trees, and a long walk beside the water, where lizards dart among the stones on the land side and on the other crabs may be seen creeping.

On the way to this garden I stopped to watch a family of gossiping bead-workers.  The old woman who sat in the door did not thread the beads as the girl does in one of Whistler’s Venetian etchings, but stabbed a basketful with a wire, each time gathering a few more.

The great outstanding buildings of the Giudecca are Palladio’s massive Redentore and S. Eufemia, and at the west end the modern Gothic polenta mill of Signor or Herr Stucky, beyond which is the lagoon once more.  In Turner’s picture in the National Gallery entitled “San Benedetto, looking towards Fusina” there is a ruined tower where Stucky’s mill now stands.