To sit still, in Venice, is to be at home to every delight. I love St. Mark's, the Piazza, the marble benches under the colonnade of the Doges' Palace, the end of land beyond the Dogana, the steps of the Redentore; above all, my own windows. Sitting at any one of these stations one gathers as many floating strays of life as a post in the sea gathers weeds. And it is all a sort of immense rest, literally a dream, for there is sleep all over Venice. I have been sitting for a long time in St. Mark's, thinking of nothing. The voices of the priests chanting hummed and buzzed like echoes in an iron bell. They troubled me a little, but without breaking the enchantment, as importunate insects trouble a summer afternoon. Very old men in purple sat sunk into the stalls of the choir, loth to move, almost overcome with sleep; waiting, with an accustomed patience, till the task was over. Here (infinite relief!) I can think of nothing. She writes to me, and I put aside the letters, and I forget quite easily that some day she will come for me, and the old life must begin over again. I do not dread it, because I do not remember it. I am still weak, and I must not excite myself; I must sink into this delicious Venice, where forgetfulness is easier than anywhere in the world. The autumn is like a gentler summer; no such autumn has been known, even in Venice, for many years; and I am to be happy here, I think. * * * * * October 25.--I have been roaming about the strange house, upstairs, in these vast garrets paved with stone, with old carved chimneys, into which they have put modern stoves, and beams, the actual roof-trees overhead; nearly all unoccupied space, out of which a room is walled up or boarded off here and there. Some of the windows look right over the court, the two stone angels on the gateway, and the broad green and brown orto, the fruit garden which stretches to the lagoon, its vine trellises invisible among the close leaves of the trees. Beyond the brown and green, there is a little strip of pale water, and then mud flats, where the tide has ebbed, the palest brown, and then more pale water, and the walls and windows of the madhouse, San Servolo, coming up squarely out of the lagoon. * * * * * October 26.--Does the too exciting exquisiteness of Venice drive people mad? Two madhouses in the water! It is like a menace.