still, and on a day of mid-autumn we are well able to imagine a kingly procession on the road from Treviso to Mestre. It seems a pageant, a progress of pomp and colour, as we pass between the vineyards and maize fields and the great gardens and pastures of the villas, down the avenue of plane trees set like gold banners on silvery flagstaffs with carpets of fallen leaves at their feet. Behind them are ranked dark cypresses, pale groups of willow, or companies of poplar. And these are often garlanded to their very summits by crimson creepers, and interspersed with statues, not perhaps great in workmanship, but tempered and harmonised into beauty by the seasons. Here and there is a lawn flanked by dark shrubbery, or a terrace ablaze with dahlias and salvia. And, among them, Baron Franchetti of the Cà d’Oro has a home even more worthy of the golden title than is his palace on the shores of the Grand Canal--a place where the sun reveals miraculous hangings in the shrubberies, sumptuously furnished with scarlet and crimson and gold. [Illustration: VIEW FROM CÀ D’ORO.] Some such festival of colour, in banners and trappings, would be Henry’s preparation for the pageant of the lagoons. For he was met at Marghera, half way between Mestre and Venice, by a troop of senators and noblemen and ambassadors, and escorted to the palace of Bartolomeo Capello at Murano. Of the young King’s lodging at Murano we have spoken elsewhere--of the hall hung with gold brocade, with golden baldaquin, green velvet and silk, its entrance guarded by sixty halberdiers armed for the occasion with gilt spears borrowed from the chambers of the Council of Ten. Forty noble youths, in glorious attire, had been told off to wait on the King. But, “although a most sumptuous supper was prepared, none the less His Majesty, when the senators were gone, showed himself a short while at the windows dressed in cloth of gold and silk; after which he went to supper, and the princes arrived, so that it was most glorious with abundant supply of exquisite viands and most delicate foods.” The hearts of the Venetians were won by the King’s beauty and youth, by his delicate person and grave aspect, by his majestic bearing and his eagerness to please and be pleased. He was in mourning for his brother, but his mourning did not shadow Venice by its gloom. “His Majesty appeared in public dressed all in purple (which is his mourning) with a Flemish cloak, a cap on his head in the Italian mode, with long veil and mantle reaching to his feet, slashed jerkin, stockings and leather collar, and a large shirt-frill most becomingly worn, with perfumed gloves in his hand, and wearing on his feet shoes with heels _à la mode française_.”