“But what did they do with the wicked brother?”

“Oh nothing—­only hanged him on that iron hook I was speaking of.  By the chin.”

“As how?”

“Passed it up through his gills into his mouth.”

“Leave him there?”

“Couple of years.”

“Ah—­is—­is he dead?”

“Six hundred and fifty years ago, or such a matter.”

“Splendid legend—­splendid lie—­drive on.”

We reached the quaint old fortified city of Bergamo, the renowned in history, some three-quarters of an hour before the train was ready to start.  The place has thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and is remarkable for being the birthplace of harlequin.  When we discovered that, that legend of our driver took to itself a new interest in our eyes.

Rested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and contented.  I shall not tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi; its stately castle that holds in its stony bosom the secrets of an age so remote that even tradition goeth not back to it; the imposing mountain scenery that ennobles the landscape thereabouts; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty Verona; nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balconies and tombs of Juliet and Romeo et al., but hurry straight to the ancient city of the sea, the widowed bride of the Adriatic.  It was a long, long ride.  But toward evening, as we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we were—­subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a conversational storm—­some one shouted—­ “Venice!”

And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great city, with its towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of sunset.

CHAPTER XXII.

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world’s applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay.  Six hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world.  To-day her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories.  Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world.  She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth, —­a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children.