Everyone probably has heard of the _Ponte de Sospiri_ or Bridge of Sighs. It is said that over this bridge walked political prisoners in the days of Venice’s greatness, and these men were never seen again. This bridge, however, is, as W. D. Howells says, “A pathetic swindle.” The Bridge of Sighs dates only from the sixteenth century, and since that time there has been only a single instance (Antonio Foscarini) of political imprisonment. The bridge led from the criminal courts in the palace to the criminal prisons on the other side of the Rio Canal. The prisons really used for political offenders were the Pozzi, often wrongly described as being beneath the level of the canal. A thick wooden casing to the walls protected the inmates from damp, and the romantic accounts of the horrors of these prisons are probably all imaginary. The best known is that of Charles Dickens: “I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a torch was placed, to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had cut and scratched inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them; for their labor with the rusty nail’s point had outlived their agony and them through many generations. One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than twenty-four hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by, another, and a dismal one, whereto at midnight the confessor came,--a monk brown-robed and hooded,--ghastly in the day and free, bright air, but in the midnight of the murky prison Hope’s extinguisher and Murder’s herald. I had my foot upon the spot where at the same dread hour the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net.” The Council of Ten which ruled Venice for many years had its place of assembly during the sixteenth century in one of the smaller apartments of the ducal palace on the second floor, a circular room with large windows, looking on the canal spanned by the Bridge of Sighs. This council had absolute power in administering justice and in governing the Venetian State. PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 27, SERIAL No. 27 [Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE] _VENICE_ _The Grand Canal_ FOUR