The Ponte Canonica, which adjoins our first Capello Palace, now allows us an easy passage, and we can take our way on the ebbing tide down the Rio del Palazzo. Below the sombre weight of the Bridge of Sighs, between the palace and the prison, we pass again into the aureole of Venice. Within the brilliant bay formed by the Riva degli Schiavoni the gulls are making festa, and away towards the city they whirl and drift like shining snowflakes in the radiance of the Grand Canal. As we pass the Piazzetta to land at the Molo, the golden sword of Justice gleams superbly luminous in the blue above San Marco. Venice has put on her glory. Chapter Nine VENETIAN WATERWAYS (PART II) The centre of our second tour is an ancient and comparatively unfrequented region in the north of Venice--that part of Cannaregio over which watches the Campanile of the Madonna dell’ Orto, with its crowning image of snowy stone and four solemn apostles looking out over city and lagoon. The beautiful figure of the Madonna, round whose feet, between the tiles of her ruddy cupola, spring little plants the birds have sown, rises day after day triumphant out of the duel between sun and mist, a pledge of the victory of light; and through all vicissitudes of weather she is seen, sometimes in dazzling outline upon the deep blue, or against a canopy of grey, sometimes herself tempered to shadowy greyness by the brilliance of the cumuli that out-rival even her snowy purity. We will enter from the Grand Canal by the Rio San Marcuola, nearly opposite the Correr Museum, and pass below the Ponte dell’ Anconetta on the Strada Nuova, or more properly the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which in its broad and ungracious uniformity is one of the most forbidding streets in Venice. It seems at first to have no reserves into which by a little tact or sympathy we may ingratiate ourselves; yet many activities generally to be encountered in other raiment and under other auspices, lurk behind its mask. On this very Rio San Marcuola is a workshop where antiquities are fabricated for the show-rooms of the Grand Canal. We see them here in their early stages, a rude stone well-head awaiting an ancient sculpture, a Renaissance chimney-piece, a Byzantine lion in Verona marble; and the forger is no villain but an honest, genial workman skilled to do better, but content to supply what he is asked for. A little beyond the bridge we come on one of the oldest squeri or boat-building yards of Venice. Black sprites of boys pass to and fro, plunging their torches into cauldrons of burning pitch, to draw them in the wake of flaming branches along the upturned sides of the gondolas; and men, with something of the fire and of the blackness in their eyes and faces, swink like the skilled demons in Spenser’s cave of Mammon. It is outside, on the squero, that this coarser work with pitch and cauldron goes on; in the inner workshop are the frames of gondolas in making, exquisite skeletons with