dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did come
forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest interest in
the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I had felt
_ennui_--nothing remained but to get up and change my relations with
the world.

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once
shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked _facchini_;
[Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters and
day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable
shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it
engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But
the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending
flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary kind of effort
in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task.
The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow,
and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at
across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was
perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snow-fall
were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a structure that
always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be any
thing but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the
beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and
ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder--
or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous
freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade,
and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble
scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints,
was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the