We crossed over to Venice to see Charley Drake off, when he was obliged to leave us. The Governor's (Ceschi's) party took the whole of the saloon. There were seventy-two first-class passengers, and only twenty-two beds. We passed a delightful night on deck on the skylights, and were awfully amused at the Governor and his wife coming up and envying us, and saying, "You English always know how to get the best places." "We like that," said Richard, "when you have taken the whole of the saloon. It might have been blowing great guns, and seas washing over the deck, and we should have had to sleep here all the same." In those days, in Venice, a gondolier serenade by moonlight was rather a romantic thing; you paid a hundred and twenty francs. There were choice singers in one large gondola full of coloured lamps; the voices were good. They sang Tasso and Dante, as well as popular songs, and little by little some two hundred gondolas would follow. It was like hunting a fox; you pursued the music gondola under the Rialto, and then came the best singing. Now two gondolas come at once, and try who can bawl the other down under the hotel windows, and sing all sorts of things that one is dead tired of. Latterly it used to drive my husband out of Venice. Poor Charley Drake left on the 4th of July. We never saw him again; he was dead the following year. This summer (1874) we got very bad Asiatic cholera, which lasted some three or four months. It killed sixteen daily, and many of them (in fact, I believe most) were ill a very short time; some cases that I know were dead in about half an hour, turning black. When its virulence was going off, I was very bad for fifteen hours; but Richard treated me, and we did not tell anybody what it was, as these things are not advisable, or, at least, _were not_ in those days. At Venice they used to put a _gendarme_ at the door, and, by way of stamping it out, nobody was allowed either to come in or to go out. We had seen so much of it in other countries that we knew quite well what to do if anything could save us, and Richard did not then catch it at all. This is one of the notes in my journal: "We all felt quite poisoned to-day by a sudden hurricane of wind and dust, which set people howling and running, blew the sea-baths to pieces, and upset the little steamer." These are the sort of delightful surprises that the weather gives one from time to time. We always had plenty of visitors from England in spring and autumn. At that time Lord Henry Percy, Lord Antrim, and Lord Lindsay came to see us, and Mr. Henry Matthews, our late Home Secretary, Sir Charles Sebright, and Mr. Peyton, popularly known as "Jack Peyton." [Sidenote: _Excursions_.]