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266 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.

incidents of the morning over afternoon tea in the best room of the little hotel, the balcony of which overlooked the riva and was nearly opposite the linen-covered statue of Victor Emanuel, which his son and the Queen had arrived in Venice to inaugurate.

The countess and Ferrari at about the same time were in council at the Fazio Palace, in a back room that over- looked a canal more than usually gloomy, more than usually confined, but the waters of which were more than usually swift, probably the result of the narrowness of the channel, which hardly seemed to give room enough for two boats to pass. Here also was a balcony, very diffe- rent from that of the Hotel Beau Rivage, with its open view of the Lido in front and on the left the blue waters of the Adriatic. This balcony was spacious. It looked upon the dead wall of a dead palace, dead as the Doges who had visited its once illustrious owner ; dead as the valiant in- scription beneath its Oriental portico ; dead as the decay- ing poles at its bricked-up doorway.

You could hardly see the sky between the two palaces, unless you looked down into the water that reflected the grey lichen decked walls. As you turned your eyes to and fro and inspected the locality, you could realize the truth or probability of all the Venetian love stories you had ever read ; you felt that this spot above all you had seen was made for romance, for intrigue, for silken ladders, for mys- terious gondolas and serious masqueraders.

The Fazio Palace had recently been restored in parts. The front, which gave upon one of the most important branches of the Grand Canal, was radiant with gold and bright with restored frescoes ; but the back, with its bal- conies upon the narrow way to which reference has been made, remained just as it was in the days before Falerio ; and the rooms of this out-of-the-way wing were also more or less in a state of dilapidated picturesqueness. The