"E la stagion che ognuno s'innamora;"

and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for hours,
subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at
them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian
housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and
gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling
their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their work. Every
street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip; and if the
picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys, of which the
vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure there is a face
looking out of every window for all that, and the social, expansive
presence of the season is felt there.

The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in crumbling
palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the welcome air.
They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of families sit
about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other
slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their raven-
haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert insects
that haunt the tangles of the children's locks. Within doors shines the
bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for an
instant.

Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the
Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest
street in Venice passes, from St. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one
of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the
spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March,