must come—­no distance at all, and if you go down through by St. Mark’s and the Bridge of Sighs, and cut through the alley and come up by the church of Santa Maria dei Frari, and into the Grand Canal, there isn’t a bit of current—­now do come, Sally Maria—­by-bye!” and then the little humbug trips down the steps, jumps into the gondola, says, under her breath, “Disagreeable old thing, I hope she won’t!” goes skimming away, round the corner; and the other girl slams the street door and says, “Well, that infliction’s over, any way, —­but I suppose I’ve got to go and see her—­tiresome stuck-up thing!” Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world.  We see the diffident young man, mild of moustache, affluent of hair, indigent of brain, elegant of costume, drive up to her father’s mansion, tell his hackman to bail out and wait, start fearfully up the steps and meet “the old gentleman” right on the threshold!—­hear him ask what street the new British Bank is in—­as if that were what he came for—­and then bounce into his boat and skurry away with his coward heart in his boots!—­see him come sneaking around the corner again, directly, with a crack of the curtain open toward the old gentleman’s disappearing gondola, and out scampers his Susan with a flock of little Italian endearments fluttering from her lips, and goes to drive with him in the watery avenues down toward the Rialto.

We see the ladies go out shopping, in the most natural way, and flit from street to street and from store to store, just in the good old fashion, except that they leave the gondola, instead of a private carriage, waiting at the curbstone a couple of hours for them,—­waiting while they make the nice young clerks pull down tons and tons of silks and velvets and moire antiques and those things; and then they buy a paper of pins and go paddling away to confer the rest of their disastrous patronage on some other firm.  And they always have their purchases sent home just in the good old way.  Human nature is very much the same all over the world; and it is so like my dear native home to see a Venetian lady go into a store and buy ten cents’ worth of blue ribbon and have it sent home in a scow.  Ah, it is these little touches of nature that move one to tears in these far-off foreign lands.

We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an airing.  We see staid families, with prayer-book and beads, enter the gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church.  And at midnight we see the theatre break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious youth and beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and behold the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black multitude of boats go skimming down the moonlit avenues; we see them separate here and there, and disappear up divergent streets; we hear the faint sounds of laughter and of shouted farewells floating up out of the distance; and then, the strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of glittering water —­of stately buildings—­of blotting shadows—­of weird stone faces creeping into the moonlight—­of deserted bridges—­of motionless boats at anchor.  And over all broods that mysterious stillness, that stealthy quiet, that befits so well this old dreaming Venice.