Strangers who visit Venice often wonder idly whether there is any meaning in the half-cabalistic signs coarsely painted on the dyed sails of the fishing-boats that glide in towards evening, one after the other, and take their places for the night, like weary live things coming home to sleep. There shines the roughly-drawn presentment of a cock, apparently in an attitude of ecstasy before a rising sun that bears a strong resemblance to an omelet; and there a mystic beast that may be meant for a donkey, unless it stands for a grasshopper. You may wonder which, unless you ask of some superannuated old fisherman loitering on the quay at sunset with his pipe for company. But he will tell you that the cock and the rising sun are the hereditary emblems of all the descendants [Illustration: OFF THE PUBLIC GARDENS] of ancient Josaphat, a fisherman of Padua who adopted them long ago; and that the monster grasshopper-donkey is really a horse, and belongs to another family of fishers, the Cavallarin; and so on, through as many as you can point out. It is the heraldry of the fisher people, begun long ago by the Niccolotti and preserved religiously by their descendants to this present time; and though heraldry is ancient in Venice, there may be stone coats of arms on walls of time-worn palaces that look down upon the Grand Canal, less old than some of these rude ancestral bearings of the sea, that have been handed down from generation to generation through uncounted centuries. Possibly, though no one would be bold enough to call it certain, the fishermen who were the Niccolotti formed the first and oldest guild in Venice; at all events the others bear a strong resemblance to theirs when we first hear of them. [Sidenote: _Molmenti, Vita Privata._] [Sidenote: _Cecchetti, Corte._] [Sidenote: _Sagredo._] They grew up in Venice, as they did in Florence and other cities of Italy, close corporations of arts and trades, which were protected by the State, and assured many privileges to those who belonged to them, chief of which was a sort of monopoly of each branch of industry, which enriched the workmen without injuring the State. Under laws by which no new object could be sold except in properly authorised shops, there was no fear of foreign competition nor of home depression. Each guild was a little republic in itself, thriving in the heart of the great maritime Republic, occupied in administering its own affairs, and never making itself a source of anxiety to the government by meddling in politics.