horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman in the carriage
about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the havoc is instantly
arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds, leaving them with jagged
and shattered edges, like broken panes of glass, and visibly holds back
the fashionable lady and gentleman from destruction. It is the fashionable
lady and gentleman who have thus recorded their obligation; and it is the
mother, doubtless, of the little boy miraculously preserved from death in
his fall from the second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the
miracle to be painted and hung at the Madonna's shrine. Now and then you
also find offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment
of good crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows
of silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine, is
to be seen in the church of San Nicolo dei Tolentini, where I should think
there were three hundred.

Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church of
her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of her
interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of votive
offerings in the temple,--though the great silver lamp placed there by the
city, in memory of the Madonna's goodness during the visitation of the
cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as representative of much
collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb church, lording it over the
noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do not know what it is saves it
from being as hateful to the eye as other temples of the Renaissance
architecture. But it has certainly a fine effect, with its twin bell-