they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
are opened about eight o'clock in the morning, and then their day's work
begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the wells;
and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden of two
buckets,--one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the right
shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which falls on the
shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of sea-sand around
the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante comes every morning
and empties her brazen buckets into the great picturesque jars of porous
earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens; and the daily supply of
water costs a moderate family about a florin a month.

Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose red
face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it is
hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all parts
of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the canals, and
penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots in their
arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think--their fancy seldom
rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful and sound and
dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted man. Long before
I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song, or rather
incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand Canal. The