I saw a wide space of silent water. It was tideless, motionless, with a strange scent of decay hanging over it. On either side, seeming to slip farther and farther away—great, dim, tinted palaces that kept memories of the architecture of the East, rich India, radiant Arabia. And the grave Goth. No glare of electric lights. There were dim little lamps swinging in front of fabulous façades, sometimes painted. There was no sound save the hiss of our long black oars against blacker water. I all but lost my senses at the beauty and the strangeness of it—this divine, dead city which seemed dropping away, on the point of disappearing forever, beneath the water of the Adriatic. For hours in the heart of the night, we swung noiselessly along cold, black, shining canals. We slipped under the Bridge of the Rialto. We slipped under the Bridge of Sighs. We saw dim ghosts of loveliness of every conceivable color and form, tower above us in the darkness, and the majesty of it and the beauty, combined with silence, kept a kind of terror. Not a sound anywhere. Not a sign of life. For a little while we lived in one of the old yellow, faded palaces. And in the daylight again we drifted down this unrivaled street, whose pictured palaces represent every period of Venetian history; on some were placards telling who had lived there; such men as Wagner, Byron, Murger, Maupassant. Then we moved to the Royal Daniele, the famous hostelry of Venice, once the home of a great family. It was built about the year 800. Any of these renowned mansions are worth a trip across the Atlantic to see. I remembered Ruskin said, that beauty began to die in the world after the Eleventh Century. And I was pleased to think I had discovered that fact myself. Here again I was following the trail of Loti. Just before Carmen Sylva, Queen of Rumania, died, she came to the Royal Daniele to stay for a time. And she invited Loti to be her guest. Its list of patrons down the ages is a rosary of great names. George Sand has been here, Chopin, D’Annunzio; and Duse exclaimed over its charm. In an old Venetian garden, one day, I saw a dignified patrician woman taking tea, with her servants bringing the food, while she stood plucking those great, white ghostly roses which I have seen only in Venice, and dreaming over the green water of the Grand Canal. Everywhere delight for the eye! Such comprehension of the possibilities of perfected living. Prince Metternich used to say when he visited Italy: _God—what men it was who built these palaces!_ No one today would know how to live in them, because the great life is gone forever. Democracies, plus money, can not make beautiful cities. It takes something altogether different. It takes the pride, the petulance of kings, slow centuries, and the caprice, the unreasoning love of poets and men. As examples—Mad Louis of Bavaria, the Great Builder of India, and the Pharaohs with their pyramids.