better; we would send them to carry the last sacraments to married men
who were peacefully slumbering near their wives, and not thinking of
extreme unction.

We were in the habit of cutting the wires of the bells in every house,
and if we chanced to find a gate open we would go up the stairs in the
dark, and frighten the sleeping inmates by telling them very loudly that
the house door was not closed, after which we would go down, making as
much noise as we could, and leave the house with the gate wide open.

During a very dark night we formed a plot to overturn the large marble
table of St. Angelo's Square, on which it was said that in the days of
the League of Cambray the commissaries of the Republic were in the habit
of paying the bounty to the recruits who engaged to fight under the
standard of St. Mark--a circumstance which secured for the table a sort
of public veneration.

Whenever we could contrive to get into a church tower we thought it great
fun to frighten all the parish by ringing the alarm bell, as if some fire
had broken out; but that was not all, we always cut the bell ropes, so
that in the morning the churchwardens had no means of summoning the
faithful to early mass. Sometimes we would cross the canal, each of us in
a different gondola, and take to our heels without paying as soon as we
landed on the opposite side, in order to make the gondoliers run after
us.

The city was alive with complaints, and we laughed at the useless search
made by the police to find out those who disturbed the peace of the
inhabitants. We took good care to be careful, for if we had been
discovered we stood a very fair chance of being sent to practice rowing