In Venice I have often spent delightful hours before, for instance, such innumerable drawings of his as: painters at the easel, ballet girls with castanets, maid-servants holding trays, music and dancing masters (indeed, is not Enrico Cecchetti in the ballet a most admirable and most Italian dancing master?), tavern-keepers, street musicians, beggars, waiters; the old patrician lolling in his easy-chair and toying with a fan; the cavaliere in their fantastic dresses; the women with their towering head-dresses. The whole sense of Venice returned to me as I saw Lydia Lopokova--always so bird-like, so like a butterfly with painted wings, so witty in gestures, so absolutely an artist in every dance she dances, in every mime she mimics, in her wild abandonment to the excitement of these shifting scenes, where all these masked and unmasked living puppets have fine nerves and delicate passions--putting powder on the face of the Marquise Silvestra and mocking her behind her back. I saw then Casanova's favorite haunts: the _ridotti_, the gambling-houses, the _cafés_ in San Marco's, the carnivals, the masked balls, the intrigues; the _traghetti_ where I seemed to see mysterious figures flitting to and fro in wide miraculous _route_ beneath the light of flickering flambeaux. I see before me, as I write, the night when I went from the Giddecca to the Teatro Rossini, where a company of excellent Italian comedians gave one of Goldoni's comedies, and, as when the chatter in the gallery ends, the chatter begins on the stage, I found for once the perfect illusion; there is no difference between the one and the other. Voluble, living Venice, with its unchanging attitude toward things, the prompt gaiety and warmth of its temperament, finds equal expression in the gallery, and in the interpretation of Goldoni, on that stage. Going to the theater in Venice is like a fantastic overture to the play, and sets one's mood properly in tune. You step into the gondola, which darts at once across a space of half-lighted water, and turns down a narrow canal between walls which seem to reach more than half-way to the stars. Here and there a lamp shines from a bridge or at the water-gate of a house, but with no more than enough light to make the darkness seen. You see in flashes: an alley with people moving against the light, the shape of a door or balcony, seen dimly and in a wholly new aspect, a dark church-front, a bridge overhead, the water lapping against the green stone of a wall which your elbow all but touches, a head thrust from a window, the gondola that passes you, sliding gently and suddenly alongside, and disappearing into an unseen quiet.