For the outside observer—comparatively outside, anyhow—and for the amateur of comedy and its material—human foibles, prejudices, ambitions—there was amusement to be had. As soon as Lucinda’s decision to renounce the inheritance—except the _palazzo_ which, as she observed to me, had been honestly come by, and honestly preserved by being let out in lodgings—Arsenio’s last will and testament became an animated topic of the day—and a rather controversial one. The clericals and their journals—Signor Panizzi’s black reactionaries and pro-Austrians—paid lip-service to the ten thousand lire for masses, but could not refrain from some surprise at the choice of trustees which the lamented Don Arsenio—a good Catholic and of old noble stock—had made (the trustees were all pestilent, as I had suspected); while the other side—the patriots, the enlightened, the radicals, the pestilents, while most gratefully acknowledging his munificence, and belauding the eminent gentlemen to whom he had confided his trust, pointed out with satisfaction how the spirit of progress and enlightenment had proved too strong in the end even for a man of Don Arsenio’s clerical antecedents and proclivities. As for Signor Panizzi, both sides agreed that his finger had been in the pie; his position as first and dominating trustee was for the one a formidable menace to, and for the other a sufficient guarantee of, a wise, beneficial, and honest administration of the fund. Under the spur of this public interest and discussion, Don Arsenio’s funeral assumed considerable dimensions, and was in fact quite an affair—with a sprinkling of “Blacks,” a larger sprinkling of “pestilents,” a big crowd of curious Venetian citizens, a religious service of much pomp conducted by Father Garcia, followed at the graveside (the priests and the “Blacks” having withdrawn with significant ceremony) by a fiery panegyric from Signor Panizzi. Altogether, when I next go to Venice, I shall not be surprised to see a statue of Arsenio there; I hope that the image will wear a smile on its face—a smile of his old variety.