that succeeded each other along the canal. Don Ippolito knew a few of
them, the gondoliers knew others; but after all, their names were
nothing. These haunts of old-time splendor and idleness weary of
themselves, and unable to escape, are sadder than anything in Venice,
and they belonged, as far as the Americans were concerned, to a world
as strange as any to which they should go in another life,--the world
of a faded fashion and an alien history. Some of the villas were kept
in a sort of repair; some were even maintained in the state of old; but
the most showed marks of greater or less decay, and here and there one
was falling to ruin. They had gardens about them, tangled and wild-
grown; a population of decrepit statues in the rococo taste strolled in
their walks or simpered from their gates. Two or three houses seemed to
be occupied; the rest stood empty, each

"Close latticed to the brooding heat,
And silent in its dusty vines."

The pleasure-party had no fixed plan for the day further than to ascend
the canal, and by and by take a carriage at some convenient village and
drive to the famous Villa Pisani at Stra.

"These houses are very well," said Don Ippolito, who had visited the
villa once, and with whom it had remained a memory almost as signal as
that night in Padua when he wore civil dress, "but it is at Stra you
see something really worthy of the royal splendor of the patricians of
Venice. Royal? The villa is now one of the palaces of the ex-Emperor of
Austria, who does not find it less imperial than his other palaces."
Don Ippolito had celebrated the villa at Stra in this strain ever since
they had spoken of going up the Brenta: now it was the magnificent
conservatories and orangeries that he sang, now the vast garden with