The good creature brought me back to life, and interested Signora Aldini in my fate. I speedily recovered from the effects of my fasting, and my persecutor, appeased by that expiation, accepted my acknowledgment of my wrong-doing, and my somewhat abrupt, but sincere expression of regret. My father, on learning from my master that I had disappeared, had come to Venice. He frowned when Signora Aldini expressed a purpose to take me into her service. He was a rough-mannered man, but proud and independent. In his view it was bad enough that my delicate constitution condemned me to live in the city. I was of too good a family to be a footman, and although gondoliers enjoyed important privileges in private establishments, there was a well-marked distinction in rank between public gondoliers and _gondolieri di casa_. These last were better dressed, to be sure, and shared the comforts of patrician life, but they were ranked as servants, and there was no such blemish in my family. However, Signora Aldini was so gracious and kindly that my excellent father, twisting his red cap about in his hands in his embarrassment, and constantly pulling his pipe from his pocket, as a matter of habit, could find nothing to reply to her affable words and her generous promises. He determined to leave me free to choose, expecting that I would refuse. But I, although I was utterly disgusted with the harp, could think of nothing but music. Signora Aldini exerted a magnetic influence over me which I cannot describe; it was a genuine passion, but an artistic passion, absolutely platonic and philharmonic. In the small room on the lower floor to which I had been taken--for I had several attacks of fever as a result of my fasting--I could hear her singing, and on those occasions she accompanied herself on the harpsichord, for she played equally well on several instruments. Intoxicated by her voice, I could not even understand my fathers scruples, and I accepted without hesitation the post of second gondolier at the Aldini palace. It was good form in those days to be _well equipped_ with gondoliers; that is to say, that, as the gondola in Venice corresponds to the carriage elsewhere, so gondoliers are at the same time luxuries and necessaries, like horses. All the gondolas being practically alike, according to the sumptuary law of the Republic, which required that they should all be draped in black, persons of wealth could make themselves noticeable among the multitude only by the figures and costumes of their oarsmen. The fashionable patrician's gondola would be propelled, at the stern, by a muscular man, of a masculine type of beauty; at the bow by a negro dressed in some unusual style, or by a fair-haired native, a sort of page or jockey, clad with taste and elegance, and placed there as an ornament, like the figure-head of a ship.