Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/27

 port-side bulwark, barren but a moment ago, bursts into a crop of heads of seamen, stewards, and engineers. The light begins to be gained upon, begins to be alongside, begins to be left astern. More rockets, and, between us and the land, steams beautifully the Inman steam-ship, City of Paris, for New York, outward bound. We observe with complacency that the wind is dead against her (it being with us), and that she rolls and pitches. (The sickest passenger on board is the most delighted by this circumstance.) Time rushes by, as we rush on, and now we see the light in Queenstown Harbour, and now the lights of the Mail Tender coming out to us. What vagaries the Mail Tender performs on the way, in every point of the compass, especially in those where she has no business, and why she performs them, Heaven only knows! At length she is seen plunging within a cable's length of our port broadside, and is being roared at through our speaking trumpets to do this thing, and not to do that, and to stand by the other, as if she were a very demented Tender indeed. Then, we slackening amidst a deafening roar of steam, this much-abused Tender is made fast to us by hawsers, and the men in readiness carry the bags aboard, and return for more, bending under their burdens, and looking just like the pasteboard figures of the Miller and his Men in the Theatre of our boyhood, and comporting themselves almost as unsteadily. All the while, the unfortunate Tender plunges high and low, and is roared at. Then the Queenstown passengers are put on board of her, with infinite plunging and roaring, and the Tender gets heaved up on the sea to that surprising extent, that she looks within an ace of washing aboard of us, high and dry. Roared at with contumely to the last, this wretched Tender is at length let go, with a final plunge of great ignominy, and falls spinning into our wake.

The Voice of conscience resumed its dominion, as the day climbed up the sky, and kept by all of us passengers into port. Kept by us as we passed other lighthouses, and dangerous islands off the coast, where some of the officers, with whom I stood my watch, had gone ashore in sailing ships in fogs (and of which by that token they seemed to have quite an affectionate remembrance), and past the Welsh coast, and past the Cheshire coast, and past everything and everywhere lying between our ship and her own special dock in the Mersey. Off which, at last, at nine of the clock, on a fair evening early in May, we stopped, and the Voice ceased. A very curious sensation, not unlike having my own ears stopped, ensued upon that silence, and it was with a no less curious sensation that I went over the side of the good Cunard ship Russia (whom Prosperity attend through all her voyages!), and surveyed the outer hull of the gracious monster that the Voice had inhabited. So, perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that held the busier Voice, from which my vagrant fancy derived this similitude.

all the sights of Venice none are more remarkable in their way than the sunsets and the pigeons. Stand on the Molo of a winter's afternoon, with the Doge's Palace on your left hand, and the church of the Salute (Our Lady of Health) on your right, and you will see the Windows of the West thrown open; you will see sunsets that suggest the Judgment Day and the destruction of the world by fire. Wait until the bells ring and the watcher on the tower has mumbled his Ave Maria, and you will see a cloud of pigeons flying from all parts of the city towards the setting sun. It is the tocsin of the Virgin Mary; "twenty-four o'clock," as the Romans say. In a little while, it will be dark, and these pigeons (sacred birds of Venice) will have sought their nests among the domes and spires of the cathedral.

How it came to be a point of pride with the Venetians to defend these birds and to leave legacies to them, and afterwards, in a bewildered sort of way, to seek saintships for them in the local calendar, are matters involved in mystery. But thus much is known respecting them.

The pigeons of Venice are the protégés of the city, as the Lions of St. Mark are its protectors. They are fed every day at two o'clock. A dinner bell is rung for them; and they are not allowed to be interfered with. Any person found ill-treating a pigeon is arrested. If it be his first offence, he is fined; if he be an old offender, he is sent to prison. In the good old days of the Republic, the guilt of shedding a pigeon's blood could only be expiated by the law of Moses taking full effect upon the culprit in the spirit of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," much as the same law was brought to bear on poachers, sheepstealers, and others in our own country, eighty years ago.

It is believed by the credulous that the pigeons of Venice are in some way connected with the prosperity of the city; that they fly round it three times every day in honour of the Trinity; and that their being domiciled in the town is a sign that it will not be swallowed up by the waves. When it is high water, they perch on the top of the tower. When the