Venice, indeed, at times falls under the phantom spell. In those mornings of late autumn when the duel between the sun and the scirocco seems as if it could not end till day is done and night calls up her reinforcements of mist, Venice is herself the ghost, her goblet brimming with a liquor that seems the drink of death, a perilous, grey, steely vapour. One only of her islands looms out of the enfolding, foggy blanket: it is San Michele, the island of the dead. On such a morning we may visit this abode of shadows, not at this hour more strange, more ghostly, than the city. To-day a veil is hung upon the hard, bare outline of its boundary wall, which in sunny weather is a glaring eye-sore as you travel towards Murano over the lagoon. Here, in the cloisters where once Fra Mauro dreamed and studied his famous Mappamondo, there is nothing to terrify the spirit on this morning of the mist. The black and tinsel drapings, the strange, unprofitable records of devotion and bereavement, the panoply of death--all these are veiled, and only the wild grasses glisten with their dewdrops on the graves of the very poor, or autumn leaves and flowers gleam from less humble graves, while the cypresses raise their solemn spires into the faintly dawning blue. But the cemetery island of San Michele together with the islands of the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore, of San Pietro di Castello and Sant’ Elena, with many lesser islands close to Venice, have become absorbed for us in the life of the city itself. Their bells and hers sound together; we see them as one with her, and from them look out to the wider lagoon, where the remoter islands, the true phantoms, wander. Many of those near to Venice have had their vicissitudes, their sometime glorious past, their pomp and solemn festival. But, bit by bit, it has been stolen from them, and the treasures which once they stored have been destroyed or gathered into the city. Now they serve only as shelters for those whose life is done--as places of repose for the dead or for the sick in mind and body. One only has passed from humble service into a fuller and happier present. San Lazzaro, once the shelter of lepers from the East, has become under the Armenian Benedictines a haunt of active, cultured life. It has a living industry, printing the ancient trade of Venice, and is in daily commerce with the East. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE.]