curtains from the same places, I suppose. And they had also brought
pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian
paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded
around to stare and listen.

There was music every where--choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes,
every thing. I was so surrounded, walled in, with music, magnificence
and loveliness, that I became inspired with the spirit of the scene, and
sang one tune myself. However, when I observed that the other gondolas
had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I
stopped.

The fete was magnificent. They kept it up the whole night long, and I
never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.

What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is! Narrow streets,
vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,
and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks
worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the
restaurant, you must call a gondola. It must be a paradise for cripples,
for verily a man has no use for legs here.

For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town,
because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the
houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming
in and out of the alleys and by-ways, that I could not get rid of the
impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet,
and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water
mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.