* * * * *

A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the departure of the hostile
aeroplanes, a day among days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The
attack which brought home the actual dangers to them did not seem to
dull their lively spirits. They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner
of Venice. The little shops were full of people, the boatmen reviled
one another in the narrow canals as they squeezed past, the _vaporetti_
and the motor-boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal.

Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to night attack as a new
condition of her peculiar life.

There were more soldiers than ever moving in the narrow, winding
footpaths, the restaurants were full of officers in fresh uniforms.
On the water-front beyond the Salute there was much movement among
the destroyers. One of these gray seabirds went out at midnight, when
war was declared, and took a small Austrian station on the Adriatic.
They brought back some prisoners and booty which seemed to interest
the Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes.

Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact
of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido
the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that
a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting
frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua.
As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and
the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to
hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact,
to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation