As the water is still rising and the Ponte di Canonica will not allow room to pass, we must move along the shining waters of San Marco till we find a more hospitable waterway. With difficulty we get under the Ponte del Sepolcro and thence down the Rio della Pietà in which, at the distance of a few strokes, we may land if we will at a low sotto-portico leading to San Giovanni in Bragora, where Cima’s noble picture, _The Baptism of Christ_, is imprisoned behind a stifling modern altar which makes it impossible to study the composition as a whole. A little farther, passing a fine ogival palace on our right, we halt before a plastered barocco house with remnants of Byzantine window-posts on an upper story. But our chief interest lies this time in the basement, in a low, narrow arch, the crowns of whose pillars, richly worked in marmo greco with griffins and lions, are, even in time of normal tides, little above the level of the water, though probably the arch once rested on pillars not less than ten feet high. This buried arch is eloquent of the rising of the waters on Venice. It arrests us by the beauty of its workmanship; but it is one of many that we must pass on each canal, though not all have placidly accepted submergence; many have kept above the water by accepting the addition of a capital or crown. Elsewhere there are notable examples of this patchwork of which Venice never is ashamed and which has produced much in her of the greatest interest. In the Salizzada di San Lio, in the sestiere of San Giustina, is a pillar, supporting one side of a sotto-portico, in which a whole page of Venetian history is comprised. Looking into it, we see that it is composed of two distinct portions, that it has in fact two capitals--a capital of the early Renaissance superimposed on a Byzantine column which retains its own. They stand happily united, these children of two ages, but we naturally ask ourselves the reason of their juncture, and the answer is that the Byzantine pillar was once sufficient to itself; it had no need of a crown to complete its dignity or service. No weight of years has shrunk it to these dwarfed proportions. It is the rising of earth from below, not pressure from above, which has reduced it. The soil of Venice has been raised, inch by inch and foot by foot, in defence against her submergence. Many basements have become uninhabitable, and Galliccioli records that in the church of SS. Vito e Modesta an ancient pavement was discovered eight feet below the existing one, while in SS. Simone e Giuda three levels were found one above another. In San Marco a confessional similar to that still at Torcello, after having been lost sight of for several centuries, was found three feet below the soil and one and a half feet below the ordinary level of the water. Our pillar, therefore, which at one time planted its foot firmly on the ground, has been gradually buried alive, and to preserve the serviceableness, as