the soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable of
thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian's great paintings, The
Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly disposed as
to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn
involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his
gridiron amid all that frigidity.

The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer
than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in
fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that such weather
as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before. In fine,
the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh, and though the
season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even Florence, it is
still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous fires and warmly-
built houses of the north. There was snow but once during my first
Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none at all; but the third,
which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, and lay
unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The lagoons were frozen for miles in
every direction; and under our windows on the Grand Canal, great sheets of
ice went up and down with the rising and the falling tide for nearly a
whole month. The visible misery throughout the fireless city was great;
and it was a problem I never could solve, whether people in-doors were
greater sufferers from the cold than those who weathered the cruel winds
sweeping the squares and the canals, and whistling through the streets of
stone and brine. The boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen
lagoons, though a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked
upon such a tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it
was said that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures
which seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds,