it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.



CHAPTER II.

ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.


I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday and
to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five o'clock,
and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I
was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated
boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage.
The porter who seized my valise in the station, inferred from some very
polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and ran out and threw
that slender piece of luggage into a gondola. I followed, lighted to my
seat by a beggar in picturesque and desultory costume. He was one of a
class of mendicants whom I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice,
and whom I dare say every traveler recollects,--the merciless tribe who
hold your gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a
displeasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call
them _gransieri_, or crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the
name or the purpose of this _poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is
the compassionate generic for all unhappy persons who work for a living in
Venice, as well as many who decline to do so.] at the station, but merely
saw that he had the Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and
arrangement of his fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous