“Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.  Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary’s shop, a blacksmith’s and shoemaker’s shop, a caffe more or less brilliant, a greengrocer’s and fruiterer’s, a family grocery—­nay, there is also a second-hand merchant’s shop where you buy and sell every kind of worn out thing at the lowest rates.  Of course there is a coppersmith’s and a watchmaker’s, and pretty certainly a wood carver’s and gilder’s, while without a barber’s shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day.  In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.

“Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt buttons and a paper of hair pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.  Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd—­these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolommeo.

“In San Bartolommeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above and shops below.  The ground floor is devoted to the small commerce of various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by tradesmen’s families; and on the third or fourth is the appartimento signorile.  From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots, which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd.  All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the casements was perceptible only in dumb show.  One of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows.  By all the odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings of yellowest gold.  For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in the crowd.  On another balcony a lady sat; at the window of still another house, a damsel