I went out in the gondola yesterday on the lagoon on the other side of the island. It was an afternoon of faint, exquisite sunshine, and the water lay like a mirror, bright and motionless, reflecting nothing but a small stake, or the hull, hoisted nets, and stooping back of a fisher and his boat. I looked along the level, polished surface to where sails rose up against the sky, between the black, compact bulk of the forts. The water lapped around the oar as it dipped and lifted, and trickled with a purring sound from the prow. I lay and felt perfectly happy, not thinking of anything, hardly conscious of myself. I had closed my eyes, and when I opened them again we were drifting close to a small island, on which there was a many-windowed building, most of the windows grated over, and a church with closed doors; the building almost filled the island; it had a walled garden with trees. A kind of moaning sound came from inside the walls, rising and falling, confused and broken. 'It is San Clemente,' said the gondolier over my shoulder; 'they keep mad people there, mad women.' * * * * * November 1.--She writes affectionate letters to me, without a respite; she will not let me alone to get well. For I am sure I could get well here if I were quite left to myself. And now even Venice is turning evil. Is it in the place, in myself, is it my disease returning to take hold of me? Is it the power of the woman coming back across land and water to take hold of me? I am getting afraid to go about this strange house at night; the wind comes in from the sea, and tears at the old walls and the roof; I scarcely know if it is the wind I hear when I wake up in the night. * * * * * November 3.--There is something unnatural in standing between water and water and hearing the shriek of a steam-engine. I am hardly too far, I suppose, from the railway-station, to have actually heard it. But the idea seems a foolish joke, unworthy of the place. * * * * * November 6.--Every day I find myself growing more uneasy. If I look out of the windows at dawn, when land and water seem to awaken like a flower, some poison comes to me out of this perhaps too perfect beauty. I dread the day, which seems to follow me and drag me back, after I have escaped another night; I never felt anything like this insidious coiling of water about one.