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.
