If the streets of Venice are bewitching by night, they are certainly delightful in the early morning. It is then that one receives the most vivid impressions. There is a certain freshness in one's perceptions at the dawn. The poor wretches who make their beds in the streets, or on the steps, or at the base of columns, shake themselves and shamble off. Troops of ragged "facchini" fill the streets, and quarrel noisily over their work. The great cisterns in the market-place are open, and the water is brought round to your house by dealers, stout young girls with broad backs and rosy cheeks; they carry it in two brass buckets attached to a pole, and empty it into large earthenware pots placed ready for its reception in the kitchen. These girls, called "bigolanti," supply the place of water-works. At this hour you see the shops opening like so many flowers before the sun. Butchers set forth their meat; fruit shops, crockery shops, bakers', cheap-clothing, and felt-hat shops, show their various wares. You see peasants at work among vegetables, building cabbages and carrots into picturesque piles, and decorating them with garlic and onions, while their masters are still sleeping on sacks of potatoes. Great barges arrive from Mestre, Chioggia, and Torcello, laden with vegetables and fruit. Eating-houses begin their trade. You see men and women taking their breakfast, and a savoury smell of spaghettis and eels on gridirons fills the air. Gondoliers begin to wash their gondolas, brush their felces, polish the iron of their prows, shake their cushions, and put everything in order for business. Picturesque old women, carrying milk in fat squat bottles, make the round of the hotels and restaurants at this early hour. They are good to look at, with their dark nut-brown faces and dangling gold earrings under their large straw hats. Their figures are much the shape of their bottles; and they bring a pleasant atmosphere into Venice, an atmosphere of fields and clover-scented earth, and milk drawn from the cream-coloured cows. Fishermen, a handsome class, with weather-beaten faces, in blue clothing, come striding down the calle, shallow baskets of fish on their heads. They set up their stalls and display their soles and mackerel, chopping up their eels into sections and crying, "Beautiful, and all alive!" At this hour everyone is making bargains, and the result is a continual buzz; but there is nothing discordant about the street cries of Venice. A peculiarly beautiful cry is that of the man who comes round every morning with wood for your kitchen fire. The fuel-men cut their wood on the shores of the Adriatic, and anchor their barges at the Custom House, leaving them in charge of mongrel yellow dogs, who guard so vigilantly and are so extremely aggressive that never a splinter is taken from the barges. [Illustration: THE WOODEN SPOON SELLER]