I shall always remember one band night here, for it was then that I saw a girl and her father whose images will never leave me, I know not why.  Every now and then, but seldom indeed, a strange face or form will thus suddenly photograph itself on the memory, when it is only with the utmost concentrated effort, or not at all, that we can call up mental pictures of those near and dear to us.  I know nothing of these two; I saw them only once again, and then in just the same fugitive way; but if an artist were now to show me a portrait of either, I could point out where his hand was at fault.  The band was playing the usual music—­Il Trovatore or Aida or Lohengrin—­and the crowd was circulating when an elderly man with a long-pointed grey beard and moustache and the peculiar cast of countenance belonging to them (Don Quixotic) walked past.  He wore a straw hat slightly tilted and was smoking a cigar.  His arm was passed through that of a tall slender girl of about his own height, and, say, twenty-five, in red.  She was leaning towards him and he slightly inclined towards her.  They walked faster than Venice, and talked animatedly in English as they passed me, and the world had no one in it but themselves; and so they disappeared, with long strides and a curious ease of combined movement almost like skillful partners in a dance.  Two nights later I saw them again.  This time she was in black, and again they sailed through the crowd, a little leaning towards each other, he again holding her arm, and again both discussing in English something with such interest that they were conscious of nothing around them.  Sitting outside a cafe on the Piazza every evening for a month, one naturally sees many travellers come and go; but none other in that phantasmagoria left any mark on my mind.  Why did these?

So much for S. Mark’s Square by night.  With thousands of persons, to think of S. Mark’s Square by day is chiefly to think of pigeons.  Many a visitor to Venice who cannot remember the details of a single painting there can show you a photograph of herself with pigeons on her shoulders and arms.  Photographers and dealers in maize are here all day to effect these pretty conjunctions; but the Kodak has seriously impaired their profits.  The birds are smaller than our London monsters and not quite so brilliantly burnished.  How many there are I have no idea; but since they are sacred, their numbers must be ever increasing.  Why they are sacred is something of a mystery.  One story states that the great Enrico Dandolo had carrier-pigeons with him in the East which conveyed the grand tidings of victories to Venice; another says that the same heroic old man was put in possession of valuable strategic information by means of a carrier-pigeon, and on returning to Venice proclaimed it a bird to be reverenced.  There was once a custom of loosing a number of pigeons among the crowd in the Piazza on Palm Sunday.  The birds being weighted floundered downwards and were caught and killed for the pot; but such as escaped were held to have earned their liberty for ever.