To forget, and rest from, other people’s thoughts, I used to walk a good deal through those narrow noiseless streets where never hoof or wheel comes to break the stillness, where old houses lean close to share old secrets, and the shadows lie clear and cool through most of the daylight hours. When the sun does strike down he turns the grey to gold, seems to gather up all the perfume of the small hidden gardens and fling it to you with a laugh on a spray of jasmine that has tossed itself over some ancient wall, or a tangle of red carnations spilling down through the scroll-work of a balcony projecting the wide curve of its iron bars far overhead, above the street. Through a half-open _portone_, dull green like the narrow canals in the shade, you catch a glimpse of a courtyard deep-sunk between high walls that are dimpled and lichened to indescribable richness of colour, and gleaming here and there with some lovely fragment of bas-relief. Cupid with one wing gone and half a bow, a row of bursting pomegranates trailing off into nothing, a few letters of some once-pompous inscription—who knows, who cares? They served out their own uses centuries ago and were stuck in here to corner a window-frame, to key an arch, to replace a brick, but the sun and the rain and the salt sweetness of Adriatic airs have fused and mellowed them to the gold-white tint of fresh curds, smoothed their marbled surface to the velvet uniformity of magnolia petals. There is a fountain in the courtyard, of course, a rough half-shell of stone set into the wall, where a slow jet trickles all day long, and is just now spilling over the brim of the red copper _conca_ that some woman has set atilt below it—and forgotten, perhaps to run upstairs and pull in the wire that dangles overhead between two windows, flapping with garments of many colours like a string of signals at sea. For there are windows that look into the courtyard, row above row—and there she is, looking out of one, a red-haired, brown-eyed young creature, with broad shoulders and sunburnt throat, a strapping baby, trying to wriggle out of its swaddling bands, in her arms. In a minute she comes down, and clatters over the broad, damp stones in her wooden clogs with yellow-velvet toe-caps—and the sight of them sets me dreaming of the Venetian ladies three hundred years ago, picking their way to Mass through the narrow twisting _calle_ on clogs too, but such clogs! A narrow stem, twelve or fourteen inches high, resting on a base not more than two inches wide, and spreading at the top into a pretty little slipper, lined with velvet, and the whole thing was covered with crimson velvet and gold lace held in place by dozens of gold-headed nails! How any woman grown ever balanced herself on those stilts is a mystery to me still.