The Innocents Abroad I

“Now! God ‘a mercy, the cruel Leonardo lords it in the cas­tle. He wrings taxes from the poor; he robs all travelers that journey by his gates; he spends his days in feuds and murders, and his nights in revel and debauch; he roasts the fathers of the church upon his kitchen spits, and enjoyeth the same, calling it pastime. These thirty years Luigi’s countess hath not been seen by any in all this land, and many whisper that she pines in the dungeons of the castle for that she will not wed with Leonardo, saying her dear lord still liveth and that she will die ere she prove false to him. They whisper likewise that her daughter is a prisoner as well. Nay, good jugglers, seek ye refreshment other wheres. ‘Twere better that ye perished in a Christian way than that ye plunged from off yon dizzy tower. Give ye good-day.”

the train was ready to start. The place has thirty or forty thou­sand inhabitants and is remarkable for being the birthplace of harlequin. When we discovered that, that legend of our driver took to itself a new interest in our eyes.

Rested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and content­ed. I shall not tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi; its stately castle that holds in its stony bosom the secrets of an age so remote that even tradition goeth not back to it; the impos­ing mountain scenery that ennobles the landscape there­abouts; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty Verona; nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balconies and tombs of Juliet and Romeo et al., but hurry straight to the an­cient city of the sea, the widowed bride of the Adriatic. It was a long, long ride. But toward evening, as we sat silent and hard­ly conscious of where we were – subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a conversational storm – some one shouted –

the water. It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not know how soon they might need the saint’s services again, now that the cholera was spreading every where. So in one vast space – say a third of a mile wide and two miles long – were collected two thousand gondolas, and every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored lanterns sus­pended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants. Just as far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together – like a vast garden of many-colored fl owers, except that these blossoms were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy evolutions. Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a rock­et that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the boats around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the faces of the young and the sweet­scented and lovely below, was a picture; and the refl ections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless, so many-col­ored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed, white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables tricked out as if for a brid­al supper. They had brought along the costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken curtains from the same places, I suppose. And they had also brought pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebe-