40 THE STONES OF VENICE

little care is there for their delicacy or grace among the rough fishermen sauntering on the quay with their jackets hanging loose from their shoulders, jacket and cap and hair all of the same dark-greenish sea-grey. But there is some life in the scene more than is usual in Venice; the women are sitting at their doors knitting busily, and various workmen of the glass-houses sifting glass-dust upon the pavement, and strange cries coming from one side of the canal to the other, and ringing far along the crowded water, from vendors of figs and grapes, and gourds, and shell-fish; cries partly descriptive of the eatables in question, but interspersed with others of a character unintelligible in proportion to their violence, and fortunately so, if we may judge by a sentence which is stencilled in black, within a garland, on the whitewashed walls of nearly every other house in the street, but which, how often soever written, no one seems to regard: “Bestemme non più. Lodate Gesù.”¹

§ 6. We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water from Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across,² and complicated boats full of all manner of nets, that look as if they could never be disentangled, hanging from their masts and over their sides; and presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St. Mark on its archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small red lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up into the air (in passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings are covered with hair, and in several other points the manner of his sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently the canal turns a little to the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main bustle of the water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach of it, some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass

¹ [“Swear no more. Praise Jesus.”]

² [“The canal ... is used chiefly by the boats that bring the water of the Brenta into Venice. When little rain has fallen, and the wells run dry, the contractors, who are bound to keep four and a half feet of water in every well, find themselves obliged to carry the fresh supply from the Brenta, past Fusina, into the city” (H. F. Brown: Life on the Lagoons, 1884, p. 47, where further particulars will be found).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]