and clattered and shrieked with a multitude celebrating the day around
the stands where pumpkin seeds and roast pumpkin and anisette-water
were sold, and before the movable kitchen where cakes were fried in
caldrons of oil, and uproariously offered to the crowd by the cook, who
did not suffer himself to be embarrassed by the rival drama of
adjoining puppet-shows, but continued to bellow forth his bargains all
day long and far into the night, when the flames under his kettles
painted his visage a fine crimson. The sagra once over, however, the
campo relapsed into its habitual silence, and no one looking at the
front of the palace would have thought of it as a place for
distraction-seeking foreign sojourners. But it was not on this side
that the landlord tempted his tenants; his principal notice of lodgings
to let was affixed to the water-gate of the palace, which opened on a
smaller channel so near the Grand Canal that no wandering eye could
fail to see it. The portal was a tall arch of Venetian gothic tipped
with a carven flame; steps of white Istrian stone descended to the
level of the lowest ebb, irregularly embossed with barnacles, and
dabbling long fringes of soft green sea-mosses in the rising and
falling tide. Swarms of water-bugs and beetles played over the edges of
the steps, and crabs scuttled side-wise into deeper water at the
approach of a gondola. A length of stone-capped brick wall, to which
patches of stucco still clung, stretched from the gate on either hand
under cover of an ivy that flung its mesh of shining green from within,
where there lurked a lovely garden, stately, spacious for Venice, and
full of a delicious, half-sad surprise for whoso opened upon it. In the
midst it had a broken fountain, with a marble naiad standing on a
shell, and looking saucier than the sculptor meant, from having lost
the point of her nose, nymphs and fauns, and shepherds and
shepherdesses, her kinsfolk, coquetted in and out among the greenery in
flirtation not to be embarrassed by the fracture of an arm, or the