From the corner of this balustrade a red rag of an awning, torn from an old tarpaulin, is stretched to an oar, its black shadow spilling down the white steps. Under this awning, flat on his back, sound asleep, lies a gondolier, fresh from Venice. Despite his nondescript costume of brigand’s leggings and cavalier’s cap I cannot mistake that broad chest and sunny face, the crisp black hair, and the fine lines of the throat and thigh. “Espero!” I call out in glad surprise. “_Commandi Signore_,” comes the quick reply, as he springs to his feet. Other gondoliers join us: Marco, who at home plys a boat at the _Traghetto_, just above the _Salute_; and Luigi, who for five years past has won at the Annual Regatta on the Grand Canal--a superb fellow is Luigi, as handsome as a Venetian, and every inch a gondolier; and Francesco, his brother, first gondolier to the Countess, whose palace fronts the _Accademia_. For the instant I am in Venice again, while they all talk to me at once, telling me of their friends and mine whom we have known there--subjects far more absorbing than all the surprises of this new world. Five minutes later we are swinging up the Lagoon, Marco bending his oar aft, Espero on the cushions beside me. There is to me a seeming fitness in entering the Court of Honor reclining in a gondola and rowed by a gondolier. No other craft that floats could so perfectly harmonize with these surroundings; none so dainty, so graceful, so dignified. There are no other oarsmen who could move with such ease and finish. These stately water-birds of Venice and their masters add, too, an element of the picturesque. They are to the lagoons what the flowers are to the esplanades, or the swans to the smaller inlets. The launches, noiseless as they are, seem out of place here and jar upon your senses; they are too new, too suggestive of progress and revenue and time-saving. But the gondola revives the traditions and customs of those earlier centuries, when this great White City of the Lake was still in its glory. Moreover, it is the only sort of princely craft which these noble families, whom you feel sure have lived for centuries in these great palaces, could use in their magnificent goings and comings. [Illustration: THE PERISTYLE.] For whenever I stand on the bridge of the Peristyle and look across the Court of Honor, surrendering myself to the magic spell of its beauty, I cannot help yielding to the conviction that this noble quadrangle is surrounded by palaces of marble [Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF DOME OF THE HORTICULTURAL BUILDING.]