It was in this campo that Mr. Howells had rooms before he married and blossomed out on the Grand Canal, and his description of the life here is still so good and so true, although fifty years have passed, that I make bold to quote it, not only to enrich my own pages, but in the hope that the tastes of the urbane American book which I give now and then may send readers to it. The campo has changed little except that the conquering Austrians have gone and Goldoni's statue is now here. Mr. Howells thus describes it: "Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the Campo San Bartolommeo, through which the busiest street in Venice passes, from S. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society. "Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffe more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy and sell every kind of worn out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market. "Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt buttons and a paper of hair pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolommeo.