So long as Venice is unvisited a new sensation is among the possibilities of life. There is no town like it in Europe. Amsterdam has its canals, but Venice is all canals; Genoa has its palaces, but in Venice they are more numerous and more beautiful. Its situation is unique, on a group of islands in the calm lagoon. But the Venice of to-day is not the Venice of thirty years ago. Even then a little of the old romance had gone, for a long railway viaduct had linked it to the mainland. In earlier days it could be reached only by a boat, for a couple of miles of salt water lay between the city and the marshy border of the Paduan delta. Now Venice is still more changed, and for the worse. The people seem more poverty-stricken and pauperized. Its buildings generally, especially the ordinary houses, look more dingy and dilapidated. The paint seems more chipped, the plaster more peeled, the brickwork more rotten; everything seems to tell of decadence, commercial and moral, rather than of regeneration. In the case of the more important structures, indeed, the effects of time have often been more than repaired. Here a restoration, not seldom needless and ill-judged, has marred some venerable relic of olden days with crude patches of color, due to modern reproductions of the ancient and original work: the building has suffered, as it must be admitted not a few of our own most precious heirlooms have suffered, from the results of zeal untempered by discretion, and the destroyer has worked his will under the guise of the restorer. The mosquito flourishes still in Venice as it did of yore. It would be too much to expect that the winged representative of the genus should thrive less in Italian freedom than under Austrian bondage, but something might have been done to extirpate the two-legged species. He is present in force in most towns south of the Alps, but he is nowhere so abundant or so exasperating as in Venice. If there is one place in one town in Europe where the visitor might fairly desire to possess his soul in peace and to gaze in thoughtful wonder, it is in the great piazza, in front of the façade, strange and beautiful as a dream, of the duomo of St. Mark. Halt there and try to feast on its marvels, to worship in silence and in peace. Vain illusion. There is no crowd of hurrying vehicles or throng of hurrying men to interfere of necessity with your visions (there are often more pigeons than people in the piazza), but up crawls a beggar, in garments vermin-haunted, whining for "charity"; down swoop would-be guides, volunteering useless suggestions in broken and barely intelligible English; from this side and from that throng vendors of rubbish, shell-ornaments, lace, paltry trinkets, and long ribands of photographic "souvenirs," appalling in their ugliness. He who can stand five minutes before San Marco and retain a catholic love of mankind must indeed be blessed with a temper of much more than average amiability.