grease-gray shawl falling from her head to the ground. The sacristan, in
his perennial enthusiasm about the great picture of the church, almost
treads upon her as he brings the strangers to see it, and she gets meekly
up and begs of them in a whispering whimper. The sacristan gradually
expels her with the visitors, and at one o'clock locks the door and goes
home.

By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o'clock mass in
the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have come to
market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle or basket. At
this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges uncertainly at the
tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his manner to the
congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is altogether rasped
and nervous. I think it is best to be one's self a little sleepy,--when
the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the church of the Scalzi,
say) has a habit of getting several centuries back from you, and of saying
mass to the patrician ghosts from the tombs under your feet and there is
nothing at all impossible in the Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble,
floating and fatly tumbling about on the broken arches of the altars.

I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek and
portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of perfect
understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with the
little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe or
disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great brazier
in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the slightest