palace.

In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the curiously
frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which has a lady and
gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony to balcony, on
the facade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of leaping from the
second to the third story, promises something. Promises something, but
does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh, clean, and new, and
cold and dark as a cellar. This house--that is to say, a floor of the
house--you may have for four hundred florins a year; and then farewell the
world and the light of the sun! for neither will ever find you in that
back court, and you will never see any body but the neighboring
laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire the front of your
house.

_E via in seguito!_ This is of house keeping, not house-hunting.
There are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice--but they are not cheap,
as many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and
ruin have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates
astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good repair,
where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed of the idle
and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed concerning life in
Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect very little for a great
deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let, made me more and more
contented with the house we had taken.

It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon it
when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the water,