"Yes," said I; "several times."

"Are they fierce?" he asked after a thoughtful pause. And then I
explained that a thousand times as many men are killed by horses every
year as by lions.

Four hundred years have made no change in the style of gondolas, or
anything else in Venice. The prow of the Venetian gondola made today is
of the same height as that prescribed by Tommaso Mocenigo, Doge in the
year Fourteen Hundred. The regulated height of the prow is to insure
protection for the passengers when going under bridges, but its peculiar
halberd shape is a thing not one of the five thousand gondoliers in
Venice can explain. If you ask your gondolier he will swear a pious oath,
shrug his fine shoulders, and say, "Mon Dieu, Signore! how should I
know?--it has always been so." The ignorance and superstition of the
picturesque gondolier, with his fluttering blue hatband and gorgeous
sash, are most enchanting. His lack of knowledge is like the ignorance of
childhood, when life has neither beginning nor end; when ways and means
present no vexatious problems; when if food is not to be had for the
simple asking, it can surely be secured by coaxing; when the day is for
frolic and play, and the night for dreams and sleep.

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