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254 vaulting are covered with mosaics on a gold ground; there is little beauty of architectural form; a sort of haze of mysterious colour fills every corner of the building; a dim, religious light, but not that, say, of Westminster Abbey; an oriental atmosphere of indefinite splendour, rather than the ordered beauty of a Gothic cathedral. It was St. Mark's day; the church thronged with people, through whom stately processions, chanting litanies, moved slowly. In one of the sacristies I saw rich specimens of Church plate, and amongst them capacious chalices cut out of rock crystal, evidently needed in old days, when the Cup was not withheld from the laity. Don't expect, in a letter like this, any attempt to describe the paintings of Titian, Bellini, and Carpaccio, or the Doges' palace, its dungeons, and the Bridge of Sighs, but come and spend most of the time, as we did, on the water in that most delightful of boats, the gondola. Engaging a gondolier for our stay in Venice, to his great amusement we practised the peculiar style of rowing that a gondola needs in some of the small canals. The idea of anyone working when he can pay someone else to do it for him is a joke to the Italian mind. Presently we ventured out into the Grand Canal, the great highway of Venice, curving like the letter "S" in its two-mile course through the city. I was rowing the bow oar, whilst the gondolier, at the stern oar, steered the boat, and passing a very smart gondola, in which two men were rowing some Americans, the Gondoliers held water, then shouted out: "Behold the mad Englishman! What labour! What an appetite! I pity his hotel keeper." To this our own gondolier replied, "Lavora, signor, lavora!" Work, signor, work! Even when we were paying him off on leaving,