touched upon the gloomiest facts of her history with a certain
impersonal statistical interest. They were rowing across the lagoon to
the Island of San Lazzaro, where for reasons of her own she intended to
venerate the convent in which Byron studied the Armenian language
preparatory to writing his great poem in it; if her pilgrimage had no
very earnest motive, it was worthy of the fact which it was designed to
honor. The lagoon was of a perfect, shining smoothness, broken by the
shallows over which the ebbing tide had left the sea-weed trailed like
long, disheveled hair. The fishermen, as they waded about staking their
nets, or stooped to gather the small shell-fish of the shallows, showed
legs as brown and tough as those of the apostles in Titian's
Assumption. Here and there was a boat, with a boy or an old man asleep
in the bottom of it. The gulls sailed high, white flakes against the
illimitable blue of the heavens; the air, though it was of early
spring, and in the shade had a salty pungency, was here almost
languorously warm; in the motionless splendors and rich colors of the
scene there was a melancholy before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully
silent. Now and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's
notice to this or that, and she briefly responded. As they passed the
mad-house of San Servolo, a maniac standing at an open window took his
black velvet skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low three times, and
kissed his hand to the ladies. The Lido in front of them stretched a
brown strip of sand with white villages shining out of it; on their
left the Public Gardens showed a mass of hovering green; far beyond and
above, the ghostlike snows of the Alpine heights haunted the misty
horizon.

It was chill in the shadow of the convent when they landed at San
Lazzaro, and it was cool in the parlor where they waited for the monk
who was to show them through the place; but it was still and warm in