John gazed at it all through half-closed eyes, till the point of the Campanile across the water seemed to melt in the quivering haze, and the dome of the chiesa was lost in the light where the sun fell on it. What had changed? What was different to his eyes that had been for the eyes of those thousands of workers who had toiled and fought, lived and died, like myriads of insects to build this timeless city of light, this City of Beautiful Nonsense? What had altered? A few coping stones, perhaps, a few mosaics renewed; but that was all. It was just the same as it had been in the days of the Council of Ten; just the same as when Petrarch, from his window on the _Riva degli Schiavona_, sat watching the monster galleys ride out in all their pomp and blazonry across the pearl and opal waters of the lagoons. In another moment the present would have slipped from him; he would have been one of the crowd upon the Piazetta, watching the glorious argosy of Domenico Michieli returning from the Holy Land, with its sacred burdens of the bodies of St. Isidore from Chios and S. Donato from Cephalonia; in another moment he would have been seeing them unload their wondrous spoils of the East, their scents and their spices, their silks and their sandalwood, had not a most modern of modern hawkers, his little tray slung by straps from his shoulder, chosen him out for prey. "Rare coins, signor," he said--"coins from every country in the world." And for the price of one lira, he offered John an English penny. John looked him up and down. "Is this your idea of humour?" he asked in Italian. The man emphatically shook his head. "Oh, no, signor! It is a rare coin." John turned away in disgust. "You’d better go and learn your business," he said. "That’s an English penny. It’s only worth ten centesimi." The hawker shrugged his shoulders and walked away. He had got the coin from a Greek whose ship lay in the _Giudecca_ there. It was no good saying what the Greek had said. The signor would never believe him. He cast a wandering eye at the ships and shrugged his shoulders once more. John watched his retreating figure with a sense of irritation--irritation because the man had gone away thinking him an English fool--irritation because, unasked, the hawker had betrayed to him his loss of a sense of humour.