But although your gondolier may not be able to read or write, he yet has his preferences in music and art, and possesses definite ideas as to the eternal fitness of things.  In Italy, many of the best paintings being in churches, and all the galleries being free on certain days, the common people absorb a goodly modicum of art education without being aware of it.  I have heard market-women compare the merits of Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, and stupid indeed is the boat “hooker” in Venice who would not know a “Titian” on sight.

But the chronology of art is all a jumble to this indolent, careless, happy people.  These paintings were in the churches when their fathers and mothers were alive, they are here now, and no church has been built in Venice for three hundred years.

The history of Venice is nothing to a gondolier.  “Why, Signore! how should I know?  Venice always has been,” explained Enrico, when I asked him how old the city was.

When I hired Enrico I thought he was a youth.  He wore such a dandy suit of pure white, and his hatband so exactly matched his sash, that I felt certain I was close upon some tender romance, for surely it was some dark-eyed lacemaker who had embroidered this impossible hatband and evolved the improbable sash!

The exercise of rowing a gondola is of the sort that gives a splendid muscular development.  Men who pull oars have round shoulders, but the gondolier does not pull an oar, he pushes it, and as a result has a flat back and brawny chest.  Enrico had these, and as he had no nerves to speak of, the passing years had taken small toll.  Enrico was sixty.  Once he ran alongside another gondola and introduced me to the gondolier, who was his son.  They were both of one age.  Then one day I went with Enrico to his home—­two whitewashed rooms away up under the roof of an old palace on the Rialto—­and there met his wife.

Mona Lisa showed age more than Enrico.  She had crouched over a little wooden frame making one pattern of lace for thirty years, so her form was bent and her eyesight faulty.  Yet she proudly explained that years and years ago she was a model for a painter, and in the Della Salute I could see her picture, posed as Magdalen.  She got fourteen cents a day for her work, and had been at it so long she had no desire to quit.  She took great pride in Enrico’s white-duck suits and explained to me that she never let him wear one suit more than two days without its being washed and starched; and she always pipeclayed his shoes and carefully inspected him each morning before sending him forth to his day’s work.  “Men are so careless, you know,” she added by way of apology.

There was no furniture in the rooms worth mentioning—­Italians do not burden themselves with things—­but on the wall I caught sight of a bright-colored unfinished sketch of the Bridge of Sighs.  It was little more than an outline, and probably did not represent ten minutes’ work, but the lines seemed so firm and sure that I at once asked who did it.