last vivid polish of respectability, and I think fortune was not his
friend. The hat was too large for him, as the hats of Italians always are;
it came down to his eyes, and he carried a cane. Every evening he marched
solemnly at the head of a procession of his handsome young children, who
went to hear the military music in St. Mark's Square.

The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians--we never knew their names--
gave access also to a house in the story above them, which belonged to
some mysterious person described on his door-plate as "Co. Prata." I think
we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance some members of his
family when they came back from their summer in the country to spend the
winter in the city. Prata's "Co.," we gradually learnt, meant "Conte," and
the little counts and countesses, his children, immediately on their
arrival took an active part in the exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry.
Later in the fall, certain of the count's vassals came to the _riva_
[Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs which descend to the water before
palace-doors and at the ends of streets.] in one of the great boats of the
Po, with a load of brush and corncobs for fuel--and this is all we ever
knew of our neighbors on the fourth floor. As long as he remained "Co." we
yearned to know who and what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he
ceased to interest us.

Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
people, just married, came to live in Venice.

They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence, tempering
the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.

The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and "This is my wife, the new