Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass--this canal of mine. Only deep enough to let a wine barge through; so narrow you must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola; so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its water surface part of everything about it, so clear are the reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space--one moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a mirror; then, when aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings, flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any painter living or dead. On summer days--none other for me in Venice (the other fellow can have it in winter)--everybody living in the rookeries camps out on the quay, the women sitting in groups stringing beads, the men flat on the pavement mending their nets. On its edge, hanging over the water, reaching down, holding on by a foot or an arm to the iron rail, are massed the children--millions of children--I never counted them, but still I say millions of children. This has gone on since I first staked out my claim--was a part of the inducement, in fact, that decided me to move in and take possession--boats, children, still water, and rookeries being the ingredients from which I concoct color combinations that some misguided people take home and say they feel better for. If you ask me for how many years I have been sole owner of this stretch of water I must refer you to Loretta, who had lived just five summers when my big gondolier, Luigi, pulled her dripping wet from the canal, and who had lived eleven more--sixteen, in all--when what I have to tell you happened. And yet, Loretta's little mishap, now I come to think of it, does not go back far enough. My claim was really staked out before she was born (I am still in possession--that is--I was last year, and hope to be this), and her becoming part of its record is but the sticking of two pins along a chart,--the first marking her entrance at five and the second her exit at sixteen. All the other years of my occupation--those before her coming and since her going--were, of course, full of the kind of joy that comes to a painter, but these eleven years--well, these had all of this joy and then, too, they had--Loretta.