The night-lapping of the waves against the Sacca della Misericordia calls to mind the two toiling fishermen of Theocritus, whose life must have been strangely like that of the first dwellers on the Rivo Alto. Let us quote from Mr. Andrew Lang’s translation. “Two fishers on a time together lay and slept: they had strown the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall. Beside them were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars and an old coble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailor’s caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door, nor a watch-dog: all things, all to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel. They had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.” This is a page for the history of Venice in her infancy, or rather for the history of that earlier time when Venice was as yet unborn. Out among the islands of the lagoon, which on a calm, vague day of summer seem to hover in the atmosphere upon a silver haze, among those luminous paths of chrysophrase and porphyry, mother-of-pearl and opal, we shall still find some footsteps of these first Venetians unerased by tract of time. Perhaps it is at Sant’ Erasmo that the print is clearest; there are few materials that we cannot find here for reconstruction of the primeval settlement. There are the rush-roofed shelters of the boats and the rude landing-stages; there are the low, white _capane_ roofed with thatch or tiles, the long, narrow, stagnant waterways, the high, grassy levels bordering the water; there are fields of reeds, and thickets or fringes of rustling poplars; there are _valli_ where the fish stir and leap and gleam continuously, breaking the smooth water into a thousand ripples; there is the broad, central waterway, and countless lesser channels and pools among the reeds, where one may see a boat slowly winding, guided perhaps by children, their little figures standing out against the desolate landscape, the silence broken by no voice but theirs. Thus must Venice have been in her infancy. And if from among these lonely waterways and grassy flats of Sant’ Erasmo we look forward into the future, we can anticipate the gradual evolution of a city such as Venice was afterwards to be. The building of the first mud-huts; the driving of the first close-set clumps of piles to support more solid structures; the filling of marsh-pools and strengthening of foundations; the light wooden bridges thrust across the water, as one may see them on the Lido to-day; the transition from houses of wood to houses of brick and stone, from thatch to tiles; the building of churches on the higher ground, each with its plot of grass about it;