forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not very engaging in
appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry, a row of seaward
frowning cannon--there was not much in all this to interest us; and so we
walked idly along, and looked either to the city rising from the lagoons
on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on the other. In the fields,
along the road, were vines and Indian corn; but instead of those effigies
of humanity, doubly fearful from their wide unlikeness to any thing human,
which we contrive to scare away the birds, the devout peasant-folks had
here displayed on poles the instruments of the Passion of the Lord--the
hammer, the cords, the nails--which at once protected and blessed the
fields. But I doubt if even these would save them from the New-World pigs,
and certainly the fences here would not turn pork, for they are made of a
matting of reeds, woven together, and feebly secured to tremulous posts.
The fields were well cultivated, and the vines and garden vegetables
looked flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and had, I thought, a
homesick look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral bottom-lands, on
the mighty streams that run through the heart of the Great West. The
Italians call our corn _gran turco_, but I knew that it was for the
West that it yearned, and not for the East.

No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants' houses which
are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel
villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found
surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were
both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and they
looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd period
of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms toward
the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before them
scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet some
distance to Malamocco.