Page:Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 2.djvu/209

Rh butcher, the baker, and the postman go their rounds in boats. Matilda was in bliss, with a gondola all to herself, where she sat surrounded with watercolours, trying to paint every thing she saw; for here the energy she had lost at Rome seemed to return to her. Amanda haunted a certain shop, trying to make the man take a reasonable sum for a very ancient and ugly bit of jewelry, which she called "a sprigalario," for want of a better name; and after each failure she went off to compose herself with a visit to the Doges.

Of course they all saw the Bridge of Sighs and the dungeons below, with their many horrors; likewise a Mass at St. Mark's, where the Patriarch was a fat old soul in red silk, even to his shoes and holy pocket-handkerchief; and the sendee appeared to consist in six purple priests dressing and undressing him like an old doll, while a dozen white-gowned boys droned up in a gold cock-loft, and many beggars whined on the dirty floor below.

Do other travellers eat locusts, I wonder, as ours did one sunny day, sitting on church steps, and discover that the food of the Apostle was not the insect whose "zeeing" foretells hot weather; but