restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its
strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed.

It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the
lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the
wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am
sorry to say--can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated
for the beauty of its women and the rapacity of its children, and
it is a fact that though some of the ladies are rather bold about
it every one of them shows you a handsome face. The children
assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be satisfied
pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano,
and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical,
but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright-
coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls
with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression,
with splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder,
faded yellow shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and
little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down the steps
of the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous
tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased with gold
beads, and eyes that meet your own with a certain traditional
defiance. The men throughout the islands of Venice are almost as
handsome as the women; I have never seen so many good-looking
rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their nets, or
lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always high-
pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they
decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and
throats as richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--
their sea-faded tatters which are always a "costume," their soft