No place in all the world shines with more brilliancy than Venice in carnival time. The city is like a diamond, as it catches the myriad rays from moonlight and starlight, and flashes countless answering gleams into the shadows of the night. It is small wonder that people travel from the farthest corners of the earth to watch the glitter and sparkle of this City of the Sea. It was on this summer evening that Rafael Valla, a Venetian lad of fourteen, decided to become a soldier of the king. He was sitting in the water-gate of his mother's house, pointing with his toe to the reflection in the canal of a particularly large and brilliant star. "If the starlight moves to the right of my toe," he said to himself, "I will go to the Piazza." He knew perfectly well that he would go to the Piazza. The music of the band was calling to him, and the star was slowly shifting its light, as it had done on many a night while Rafael sat waiting and dreaming in the gateway. The tide was gently pulling his little boat away from the orange-and-black mooring-post, at the foot of the steps, toward the larger canal. "Perhaps my boat knows of all the gay sights that are waiting for it in the Grand Canal," the boy thought idly. "It may well know," he added in his thought; "it has been there times enough." The Grand Canal is the largest and finest of all the water-ways which thread the city. It is spanned by three beautiful bridges, and, on either side, rise the marble palaces of the ancient Venetian nobility; those rulers of men whose names fill the "Golden Book of Venetian History." [Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE Notice the mooring-posts and the black gondola.] But Rafael lingered in the gateway. The music of the band was a promise of something still better. Soon hundreds of gondolas would gather at the bridge of the Rialto to hear the songs of the serenaders, and that was what the boy loved best. As the bells in the square sounded the hour, he rose, reached for the rope, and pulled his boat toward the stone landing steps. His motions were alert and decisive, and made him seem a different boy from the one who had been leaning so carelessly against the post of the gateway. Rafael was good friends with his oar, and the little boat, which was only large enough to seat three comfortably, hurried gladly toward the lights of the Grand Canal, and the music in the beautiful Piazza of St. Mark. Hundreds of black gondolas were moving up and down the canals, manned by boatmen in white linen, for the night was very warm; and a melody from an Italian opera, sung in a musical tenor voice, floated from one of the boats. "I, also, would sing, if it were not pleasanter to listen," said Rafael to his boat. Then it occurred to him that it might be most pleasant of all to find his friend Nicolo and take him to hear the singers at the Rialto bridge.