interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the sacristy; but
I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs in the church. I
have no doubt he has passed through the open door of Canova's monument,
and that he sees some coherence and meaning in Titian's; he has been all
over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows whether the
griffins descend from their perches at the midnight hour to bite the naked
knees of the ragged black caryatides. This profound and awful animal I
take to be a blood relation of the cat in the church of San Giovanni e
Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian during divine service, and loves a
certain glorious bed on the top of a bench, where the sun strikes upon him
through the great painted window, and dapples his tawny coat with lovely
purples and crimsons.

The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag the
deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of the
absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories rehearsed.
I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a national antipathy
toward those troops of German tourists, who always seek the
Sehenswuerdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,--the men wearing their
beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as much like English
people as possible; while their valet marshals them forward with a stream
of guttural information, unbroken by a single punctuation point. These
wise cats know the real English by their "Murrays;" and I think they make
a shrewd guess at the nationality of us Americans by the speed with which
we pass from one thing to another, and by our national ignorance of all
languages but English. They must also hear us vaunt the superiority of our
own land in unpleasant comparisons, and I do not think they believe us, or