"Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there."

"Oh, yes."

"It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?"

"Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there."

"But I thought Venice interesting."

"Sufficiently, signor. _Ma!_" said the Mouse, shrugging his
shoulders, and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his
choice of cities, "the water is so bad in Venice."

The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to
form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render the
weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his
momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the
Monte di Pieta. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who has
worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.

But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on
the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there.
_Ma!_ After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead.
There is nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much
and gain little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.

By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we
almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach the
hotel in Rovigo, and disappears--down the first hole in the side of a