its statued walks between rows of clipt cedars and firs, now the
stables with their stalls for numberless horses, now the palace itself
with its frescoed halls and treasures of art and vertu. His enthusiasm
for the villa at Stra had become an amiable jest with the Americans.
Ferris laughed at his fresh outburst he declared himself tired of the
gondola, and he asked Florida to disembark with him and walk under the
trees of a pleasant street running on one side between the villas and
the canal. "We are going to find something much grander than the
Villa Pisani," he boasted, with a look at Don Ippolito.

As they sauntered along the path together, they came now and then to a
stately palace like that of the Contarini, where the lions, that give
their name to one branch of the family, crouch in stone before the
grand portal; but most of the houses were interesting only from their
unstoried possibilities to the imagination. They were generally of
stucco, and glared with fresh whitewash through the foliage of their
gardens. When a peasant's cottage broke their line, it gave, with its
barns and straw-stacks and its beds of pot-herbs, a homely relief from
the decaying gentility of the villas.

"What a pity, Miss Vervain," said the painter, "that the blessings of
this world should be so unequally divided! Why should all this
sketchable adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a city that
is so rich as Venice in picturesque dilapidation? It's pretty hard on
us Americans, and forces people of sensibility into exile. What
wouldn't cultivated persons give for a stretch of this street in the
suburbs of Boston, or of your own Providence? I suppose the New Yorkers
will be setting up something of the kind one of these days, and giving
it a French name--they'll call it _Aux bords du Brenta_. There was
one of them carried back a gondola the other day to put on a pond in