The patrician Alvise Pisani possessed a beautiful house at San Cassian, standing on a tongue of land called Biri Grande. From the embrasured windows Murano could be seen, and the island of San Cristoforo, and of Pace; beyond these, in the distance, rose the tall tower of Torcello, and a dark line along the water marked the forest of the distant island called Deserto; to the left rose the Euganean Hills, to the right stretched a long beach of gleaming sand. The fishermen used to say that when the mysterious glow spread over the waters of the lagoon at night, the Fata Morgana had floated up the Adriatic and was bathing in the dark. [Illustration: AFTERGLOW, THE GRAND CANAL] All those things might be seen from the windows of Alvise Pisani’s house; and there dwelt Titian, no longer the thoughtless gallant of his earlier days, but grave now, stately and magnificent. Violante is forgotten, he lives honourably with his wife Cecilia, but he [Illustration: EUGANEAN HILLS FROM THE LAGOON, LOW TIDE] still keeps his love of conversation, his luxurious tastes, his lordly manner; and now he feels himself the equal of the great of the earth, and it amuses him to exchange letters with princes. For secretaries he has poets, historians, and even a cardinal; he is the Titian who will allow an emperor to stoop for the brush that has fallen from his hand. But few men ever had such grace and winning charm, and his house is ever open to his countless friends, a place of gathering, of wit and of good talk, where ladies are received, some of whom a later age will call blue-stockings, ladies who are members of learned academies, and ladies that play the lute. Such was Titian, and such the house in which he was rarely alone. He had among many friends two at least with whom he was really intimate, the sculptor Sansovino, and Pietro Aretino the man of letters. The former was the friend of his heart and of his artistic intelligence; the latter he himself regarded as a sort of wild beast whom he had tamed and whom he kept to frighten his rivals and his enemies. He could not let a day go by without seeing both, and the three were generally together. If one of them was asked to dinner, he invariably begged his host to invite the other two. They certainly did not resemble one another. Aretino was an adventurer who had tried most things: in his boyhood he had forged and stolen; in his young prime he had been a renegade monk, and then a courtier; in his maturity, to use one of his own expressions, he earned his living by the sweat of his ink. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had hired a house for [Sidenote: _Tassini, under Carbon._]