At the door, to which we are guided by a boy or so who know that cigarettes are thrown away at sacred portals, is the sacristan, an aged gentleman in a velvet cap who has a fuller and truer pride in his fane than any of his brothers in Venice yonder.  With reason too, for this basilica is so old as to make many Venetian churches mere mushrooms, and even S. Mark’s itself an imitation in the matter of inlaid pavement.  Speaking slowly, with the perfection of enunciation, and burgeoning with satisfaction, the old fellow moves about the floor as he has done so many thousand times, pointing out this beauty and that, above and below, without the faintest trace of mechanism.  In course of time, when he is fully persuaded that we are not only English but worthy of his secret, it comes out that he had the priceless privilege of knowing Signor “Rooskin” in the flesh, and from his pocket he draws a copy of The Stones of Venice, once the property of one Constance Boyle, but now his own.  This he fondles, for though the only words in his own chapters that he can understand are “Murano” and “Donato,” yet did not his friend the great Signor Rooskin write it, and what is more, spend many, many days in careful examination of everything here before he wrote it?  For that is what most appeals to the old gentleman:  the recognition of his S. Donato as being worthy of such a study.

The floor is very beautiful, and there is a faded series of saints by one of the Vivarini of Murano, behind the altar, on which the eye rests very comfortably—­chiefly perhaps on the panels which are only painted curtains; but the most memorable feature of the cathedral is the ancient Byzantine mosaic of the Madonna—­a Greek Madonna—­in the hollow of the apse:  a long slender figure in blue against a gold background who holds her hands rather in protest than welcome, and is fascinating rather for the piety which set her there with such care and thought to her glory than for her beauty.  Signor Rooskin, it is true, saw her as a symbol of sadness, and some of the most exquisite sentences of “The Stones of Venice” belong to her; but had her robe been of less lovely hues it is possible that he might have written differently.

When the church was built, probably in the tenth century, the Virgin was its patron saint.  S. Donato’s body being brought hither by Doge Domenico Michiel (1118-1130), the church was known as Santa Maria, or San Donato; and to-day it is called S. Donato.  And when the time comes for the old sacristan to die, I hope (no matter what kind of a muddle his life has been) that S. Donato will be at hand, near the gate, to pull him through, for sheer faithfulness to his church.

The gondola returns by the same route, and as we pass the Campo Santo the rays of the afternoon sun seem so to saturate its ruddy walls that they give out light of their own.  It is in order to pass slowly beneath these walls and cypresses that I recommend the gondola as the medium for a visit to Murano.  But the penny steamers go to a pier close to S. Donato and are frequent.