complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to
room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my
fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over
the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she
sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion,
baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the
public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended
to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons.
There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and
Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in
furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in
her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea
of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! _could_ we
fight for our sacred _scaldini_?

Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears, for
they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of poverty
below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the wretcheder
poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections of summer, as
Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances, during one of
his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who always sits upon
the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe, as the season
advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and unswerving
adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it. I have no
reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment during the
whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of comfort to do so.

In the winter, the whole city _sniffs_, and if the Pipchin theory of
the effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true, few
people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if Desdemona,