blue or grey passes refreshingly along a pavement made bizarre by
expensive and foolish fashions; one realizes it even more in Venice.

Most of these girls have dark or black hair. The famous red hair of
Venetian women is rarely seen out of pictures.

Round and round goes the chattering contented crowd, while every table
at each of the four cafés, Florian's and the Aurora, the Quadri and the
Ortes Rosa, swells the noise. Now and then the music, or the ordinary
murmur of the Square in the long intervals, is broken by the noisy
rattle of a descending shop shutter, or the hour is struck by the
Merceria clock's bronze giants; now and then a pigeon crosses the sky
and shows luminous where the light strikes its breast; now and then a
feather flutters from a window ledge, great bats flit up and down, and
the mosquitoes shrill in one's ear. It is an entertainment never failing
in interest to the observer, and not the least amusing question that one
asks oneself is, Where does every one sleep?

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 _Aïda_ 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