a dreadful lure, and while you rest your elbows on these
cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But in truth Venice
isn't in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The
effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic,
and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of
your milieu. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to
you sophistically that such hours should be devoted to collecting
impressions. Afterwards, in ugly places, at unprivileged times,
you can convert your impressions into prose. Fortunately for the
present proser the weather wasn't always fine; the first month
was wet and windy, and it was better to judge of the matter from
an open casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive
gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant entertainment
in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of
the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there were
charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the
anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the
Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all
turned warm--warm to the eye as well as to other senses. After
the middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The sea took on
a thousand shades, but they were only infinite variations of
blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of began to flush in the
thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard of weather-
stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of sky
above a calle, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the
painters say, to "compose." The lagoon was streaked with odd
currents, which played across it like huge smooth finger-marks.
The gondolas multiplied and spotted it allover; every gondola and
gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely like every other.