My father at one time collected ancient footgear and then forgot all about it; so it came to pass that in a corner of our old nursery at the Villa Negroni there lay the strangest heap of toys that any modern child ever had to play with—several pairs of these exquisitely ornamented _sabots_ tumbled in with pink and scarlet silk slippers of the Watteau period, and later. One pair I remember, with heels like knitting-pins, so high that only the very point of the foot touched the ground at all. But oh, how the little feet that wore them must have suffered! They had certainly walked in such shoes from childhood, for the foot had sunk down and lost shape until, pathetically small as the little slipper was, it was as lumpy and shapeless as a clenched fist and almost as broad as it was long. By the time I remembered her again, after my mental excursion, my Giorgione beauty had twisted a towel into a turban, placed it on her red hair, and, lifting the _conca_ on to her head with a turn of the hand, and without spilling a drop, had disappeared up the dark stairway, all in less time than it takes to tell. Then, after stealing one fat pink oleander blossom from the tree in the corner, I went on my way, sniffing its nutty sweetness, to lose myself in the silent labyrinth of those little-trodden alleys, and then be suddenly brought to a standstill by a deep, narrow canal, unbridged, green, silent, serving as the water door to the rooms of dark old houses that frowned at each other across it. At every few yards stone steps led down, the water lapping confidentially over the lowest ones. [Illustration: TORCELLO. THE CATHEDRAL AND THE CHURCH OF ST. FOSCA. Photo by Alinari.] From far away comes the long warning cry, “_O, Premí_,” that has puzzled generations of etymologists unable to give even a guess at its derivation. But everybody knows its meaning—you hear it a hundred times a day at every angle of the canals, telling those whom it concerns that a gondola is coming round the corner. The next moment it has swung into sight, the long, sinuous black thing cutting through the water so smoothly and imperiously, pulling up suddenly without jerk or sound beside the steps to let its fare slip on shore or its gondolier deliver a message—in the soft, lisping dialect that sounds like insects’ wings in a summer noon—to some one waiting for it on a balcony above. It is the little things that are so real and charming in Venice, I think—the glimpses of life among the unchanging, persistent common people, who live as they have always lived in the discreet, still atmosphere of the back streets and the forgotten waterways.