When I walk through a familiar room in the dark, a peculiar warning like a ghostly touch is laid on my forehead as I come near any object on a level with it, and that same feeling came to me there at Torcello, I remember. It seemed as if it all were known to me, as if every flower and blade of grass called out, “We were here with you before!”—as if the small forsaken basilica had meant the heart of home in some lapsed period that life, as I knew it, could in no way account for. Its loveliness was so removed, so ascetic that one held one’s breath for fear of disturbing its peace; the marble seats, the central throne, seemed all peopled by grave shades of presbyters, surrounding their Bishop, their long straight vestments marked with the gold cross from shoulder to shoulder and from neck to feet; I could almost fancy I heard their deep chant, first from this side of the mounting tribune and then from that, echoing in the cold spaces overhead and dying away down the nave among the columns. I believed the old story then, that Torcello had been the first resting-place of the hunted exiles fleeing seaward from the Huns; it was not that; I doubt whether the basilica was really built in the Seventh Century as the guidebooks say; Rialto had its Church long before Torcello; but Rialto has been the artery of Venice’s throbbing vitality too long for any associations to cling to it now, while Torcello has stood aside, a recluse that has never wavered in its loyalty to the Past, and the Past is enshrined there for all time. I was surprised to find that it and I were friends. There are only two of all the dead and gone centuries of Europe that seem really my own besides the one I was born in—and they do not belong to the chaotic times of Barbarian invasion and Byzantine supremacy. But the nameless sweetness of the airs that play so gently over the forsaken island said something that day that could never be forgotten, and the impression was so strong and so perfect that I have never wished to tamper with it by a second visit. Strangely enough Torcello dismissed us with contumely, for as we left it in the late afternoon we encountered a fearful storm and came, I think, very near to being swamped. The thunder simply hurled itself from every quarter at once, the sea rose in inky billows of terrifying dimensions, and between them and the rain we were drenched to the skin, and very thankful when Sandruccio, who behaved splendidly, finally landed us on the slippery steps of our hotel.