Leaving the sestiere of Santa Giustina, with its relics of ancient Venice and its famous Palace of the Contarini, on our right, and also on our right, the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, where in the darkness of the Giustiniani Chapel are preserved some of the most beautiful sculptures of the Lombardi, we turn sharply to the left into the Rio del Pestrin, and again to the left into the Rio San Lorenzo. This Rio San Lorenzo is the scene of one of Gentile Bellini’s most famous pictures. We are parallel here with the Rio di Sant’ Antonin, by which we came from the basin of St. Mark. The miracle represented by Bellini as taking place here is one of those connected with a fragment of the true Cross belonging to the School of San Giovanni Evangelista. Some of the finest artistic power of Venice was lavished in honouring the virtues of this relic, and we owe to it inestimably precious records of the city in the days of her splendour. We understand in watching Bellini’s procession something of the nature of those ever-recurring ceremonies which made Casola feel that the Venetians must needs be specially beloved of God. The three-arched bridge of San Lorenzo, which is the structural centre of the composition, is thronged with a white-robed confraternity bearing splendid candles which glint among the trees that are tied upon the bridge, and that we see receding into the campo of the church which is hidden from us. In the centre of the bridge is fixed the banner of the Confraternity, waving in the wind. The throng upon the bridge is by no means idle; there is the effect of that incessant movement of which one is conscious in the densest crowd, and those at its edge are eagerly watching the doings in the water. It is indeed the water that excites our chief interest; Bellini has contrived to perpetuate numberless familiar graces and dignities in the rowers whom we see framed by the central arch of the bridge, or holding up their boats alongside of it. But it is the novel element of the swimmers in the canal which gives the picture a unique place in our regard. In the space of water between the bridge and the temporary platform in the immediate foreground, where kneels a monumental little company of Venetian gentlemen--tradition says the family of the Bellini--is an aquatic display of the most delicate order. Four of the Brothers swim in the clear green water, upheld by their flowing robes like a water-lily by its leaves, and one, the Grand Guardian--as he treads water with admirable equilibrium and an easy grace that is beyond all praise--holds up on high the precious Cross. No words can describe the delight that these swimmers afford us. Their whole heart is in the quest; two of them, an old man and a young, who have been pursuing the elusive trophy in vain, have seen the discovery and slackened their strokes; but one, who has evidently just dived off the fondamenta, is striking boldly out and trying with