"What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family
apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in
this country? Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever
wears it after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds?"
For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the
answer to the other when he passes a meat-dealer's shop in the
town and sees spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings
and sparrows and finches exposed for sale. An Italian will cook
and eat anything he can kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary
to a katydid.
Thinking this barbarity over, I started to get indignant; but just
in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the
canvas-back duck and the wild pigeon and the ricebird and the
red-worsted pulse-warmer, and other pleasing wild creatures of the
earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct. And
I felt that before I could attend to the tomtits in my Italian
brother's eye I must needs pluck a few buffaloes out of my own;
so I decided, in view of those things, to collect myself and
endeavor to remain perfectly calm.
We came into Venice at the customary hour - to wit, eleven P.M.
- and had a real treat as our train left the mainland and went
gliding far out, seemingly right through the placid Adriatic, to
where the beaded lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the
withered throat of a long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of
her moldered wedding finery for a bridegroom who comes not.
Better even than this was the journey by gondola from the terminal
through narrow canals and under stone bridges where the water
lapped with little mouthing tongues at the walls, and the tall,
gloomy buildings almost met overhead, so that only a tiny strip
of star-buttoned sky showed between. And from dark windows high
up came the tinkle of guitars and the sound of song pouring from
throats of silver. And so we came to our hotel, which was another
converted palace; but baptism is not regarded as essential to
salvation in these parts.
On the whole, Venice did not impress me as it has impressed certain
other travelers. You see, I was born and raised in one of those
Ohio Valley towns where the river gets emotional and temperamental
every year or two. In my youth I had passed through several of
these visitations, when the family would take the family plate and
the family cow, and other treasures, and retire to the attic floor
to wait for the spring rise to abate; and when really the most
annoying phase of the situation for a housekeeper, sitting on the
top landing of his staircase watching the yellow wavelets lap inch
by inch over the keys of the piano, and inch by inch climb up the
new dining-room wallpaper, was to hear a knocking at a front window
upstairs and go to answer it and find that Moscoe Burnett had come
in a john-boat to collect the water tax.
