At six o'clock in the morning, they come to their gondolas, fastened to posts with their prows aground. Then they begin to scrape and wash their _barchette_ at the _Traghetti_, just as dragoons curry, brush and sponge their horses on picket. The ticklish sea-horse is restive and refuses to stand still under the movements of its horseman, who draws water in a wooden vessel and pours it over the sides and into the well of the craft. He several times repeats the aspersion, taking care to discard the water from the surface of the sea in order to obtain the cleaner water below. Then he scrubs the oars, polishes the brasses and the glass of the little black deck-house, dusts the cushions and carpets and rubs up the iron head of the prow. The whole is not done without a few words of humour or affection addressed, in the pretty Venetian dialect, to the skittish or docile gondola. When the gondola's toilet is completed, the gondolier proceeds to make his own. He combs his hair, shakes out his jacket and his blue, red or grey cap, washes his face, feet and hands. His wife, daughter or mistress brings him a bowl containing a mess of vegetables, bread and meat. Breakfast over, each gondolier awaits Fortune, singing: he has her before his eyes, one foot in the air, holding out her scarf to the wind and serving as a weather-cock, at the top of the monument of the Dogana di Mare. Does she give the signal? The favoured gondolier, with oar upraised, starts out at the back of his craft, even as Achilles used to fly in former days, or as one of Franconi's[122] circus-riders gallops to-day on the crupper of a fiery steed. The gondola, shaped like a skate, glides over the water as over ice: "_Sia, stati! Sta longo!_" that does for the whole day. Then night comes, and the _calle_ will see my gondolier singing and drinking with his _zitella_ the half-sequin which I leave him, as I go off most certainly to replace Henry V. on the throne. VENICE, _September_ 1833. I was trying to find out, when I woke, why I liked Venice so much, when I suddenly remembered that I was in Brittany: it was the force of kindred that found utterance within me. Was there not, in Cæsar's time, in Armorica, a country of the Veneti[123]: _civitas Venetorum, civitas Venetica?_ Has not Strabo "said that they said" that the Veneti[124] were the descendants of the Veneti of Gaul? It has been contradictorily held that the fishermen of Morbihan were a colony of the _pescatori_ of Palestrina: Venice, then, would be the mother and not the daughter of Vannes[125]. One can reconcile this by supposing, which for that matter is very probable, that Vannes and Venice were mutually brought to bed of one another. I therefore look upon the Venetians as Bretons; the gondoliers and I are cousins, sprung from the horn of Gaul: _cornu Galliæ._[126] [Sidenote: On the Riva degli Schiavoni.]