“Well, what do you think, Miss Vervain?” he asked, when their senses had somewhat accustomed themselves to the noise of the procession; “do you say now that Venice is too gloomy a city to have ever had any possibility of gayety in her?” “I never said that,” answered Florida, opening her eyes upon him. “Neither did I,” returned Ferris, “but I’ve often thought it, and I’m not sure now but I’m right. There’s something extremely melancholy to me in all this. I don’t care so much for what one may call the deplorable superstition expressed in the spectacle, but the mere splendid sight and the music are enough to make one shed tears. I don’t know anything more affecting except a procession of lantern-lit gondolas and barges on the Grand Canal. It’s phantasmal. It’s the spectral resurrection of the old dead forms into the present. It’s not even the ghost, it’s the corpse of other ages that’s haunting Venice. The city ought to have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed the Republic, and thrown overboard--St. Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and all. There is no land like America for true cheerfulness and light-heartedness. Think of our Fourth of Julys and our State Fairs. Selah!” Ferris looked into the girl’s serious face with twinkling eyes. He liked to embarrass her gravity with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her endeavors to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident trouble when she could find none. “I’m curious to know how our friend will look,” he began again, as he arranged the cushion on the window-sill for Florida’s greater comfort in watching the spectacle, “but it won’t be an easy matter to pick him out in this masquerade, I fancy. Candle-carrying, as well as the other acts of devotion, seems rather out of character with Don Ippolito, and I can’t imagine his putting much soul into it. However, very few of the clergy appear to do that. Look at those holy men with their eyes to the wind! They are wondering who is the _bella bionda_ at the window here.” Florida listened to his persiflage with an air of sad distraction. She was intent upon the procession as it approached from the other side of the Piazza, and she replied at random to his comments on the different bodies that formed it.