"Listen to him! how he raves!" cried Beppa, wiping her lute which was already wet with dew; "and I took him for a reasonable man!" "For a cold, perhaps a selfish man, eh, Beppa?" rejoined the artist with a melancholy air, as he sat down. "Well, I myself have at times believed that I was such a man; for I have done some reasonable things, and I have made some sacrifices to the demands of society. But when in the evening the bands of the Austrian regiments wake the echoes of our great squares and our placid canals, with airs from _Der Freischutz_ and fragments of Beethoven's symphonies, then I find that I have tears in abundance, and that my sacrifices have been worth but little. A new sense seems to awake within me: the sadness of regret and a longing for reverie, elements which seldom enter into our southern character, find their way into my system through every pore, and I see clearly enough that our music is incomplete, and that the art which I serve is insufficient to express the impulses of my heart; that is why I am, as you see, disgusted with the stage, surfeited with the excitement of triumph, and in nowise desirous to win fresh applause by the old methods; I would like to plunge into a life full of new emotions, and find in the lyric drama an image of the drama of my whole life; but in that case I should perhaps become as gloomy and despondent as a Hamburger, and you would laugh at me without pity, Beppa! That must not be. Let us drink, my good friends! _viva_ merry Italy and Venice the fair!" He put his glass to his lips, then absent-mindedly replaced it on the table without swallowing a drop of wine. The abbé answered him with a sigh, Beppa pressed his hand, and after a few moments of melancholy silence, Lelio, being urged to fulfil his promise, began his narrative in these words: I am, as you know, the son of a fisherman of Chioggia. Almost all the people along that shore have a well developed thorax and a powerful voice. Their voices would be beautiful if they did not ruin them early in life on their boats by trying to drown the roar of the sea and the wind, and by drinking and smoking beyond all reason, to avoid drowsiness and fatigue. We Chioggiotes are a fine race. It is said that a great French painter, _Leopoldo Roberto_, is even now engaged in commemorating our type of beauty in a picture which he allows nobody to see.