glancing at the occasion. We glance at it from our palace
windows; lengthening our necks a little, as we look up toward the
Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, so serried as
to move slowly, pour across the temporary footway. It is a flock
of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All
Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all
Venice pushes anyone into the water.

But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching
of the neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a
famous pretender eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is
served in the open air, on a neat little terrace, by attendants
in livery, and there is no indiscretion in our seeing that the
pretender dines. Ever since the table d'hote in "Candide" Venice
has been the refuge of monarchs in want of thrones--she would n't
know herself without her rois en exil. The exile is
agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its
movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by
little it rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty
of leisure to write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I
believe he has organs in which they are published; but the only
noise he makes in the world is the harmless splash of his oars.
He comes and goes along the Canalazzo, and he might be much worse
employed. He is but one of the interesting objects it presents,
however, and I am by no means sure that he is the most striking.
He has a rival, if not in the iron bridge, which, alas, is within
our range, at least--to take an immediate example--in the
Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but beautiful in its
crooked old age, with its lovely proportions, its delicate round
arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the haunted