The Christian may despise the Jew; but he has the grace to keep the feeling to himself, for the Jew possesses a great part of the trade of the city, and in money matters has ever the upper hand. He is educated, intellectual, patriotic, and calls himself a Venetian. If he is rich he lives in a fine new house on the Grand Canal and is owner of other houses. An instinct of the poorer class of Jews in Venice is to set up pawnshops and lend money to tradesmen in times of necessity. The Jews are decidedly useful. In the old days they were driven into exile; but they were soon called back. They were made to wear a yellow badge, distinguishing them from Christians. They were not allowed to buy houses or lands, or to exercise any trade or profession excepting that of medicine. They were given a dwelling-place in the dirtiest, unhealthiest part of the city, and called it a Ghetto, meaning a congregation. It was walled in. The gates were kept by Christian guards, who were paid by the Jews, and opened the doors at dawn, closing them at sunset. The Jews were not allowed to emerge on holidays or feast days, and two barges full of armed men watched them night and day. A special magistracy had charge of their affairs. Their dead were buried in the sand on the seashore. Thither the baser of the Venetians made it a habit to go on Mondays in September, to dance and make merry on the graves. The Jews were made to pay tribute to Venice every third year. In spite of all hardships and deprivations, they flourished. As the Christians became poor, the Jews waxed rich. They were not again expelled from the city. They were never disturbed in their Ghetto by actual ill-treatment and violence, excepting on one occasion, when a charge was brought against them of child murder. So the Jews lived peacefully in their own quarter until, with the advent of modern civilisation, their prison walls crumbled away, and some of them went forth from the Ghetto and fixed their habitations in different parts of the city. Many Jewish families, however, cling to the spot made sacred for them by so much suffering and humiliation. Even to this day, although the Jews are distributed everywhere throughout the length and breadth of Venice, never a Christian comes to dwell in the Ghetto. Very many Jews still live there. Some of the women are handsome, with Oriental grace, delicate, sensitive, highly bred. The only time when the Ghetto has at all a picturesque appearance is the autumn. Then the air is filled with white floating particles, feathers of geese, which seem to be plucked by the whole force of the populace. You see on every doorstep groups of Hebrew youths plucking geese, and on looking into the interior you will observe strings of the birds suspended from the rafters, while an odour of roast goose greets your nostrils wherever you may go. [Illustration: GIUDECCA] HISTORY