he had known Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from the
Port of San Nicolo to his palace-door. The distance is something over
three miles, but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat was not so
great as it seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a mill-race. I
think it would be impossible to make the distance against the tide.



CHAPTER XVI.

COMMERCE.


To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions of
the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice with a
vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular peers
in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial Relations
annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers. It grieved
me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen, should
occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my beloved
Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that I used to
post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater than all the
rest of the world's together. I sometimes desperately eked out the
material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber of
Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and its
cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender mining
interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these