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Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays always at just the same hour, regardless of weather we would see the old hunchback light the lamps, and in a few moments the Master would appear, tuck up his black robe, step into the boat, take the oar, and away they would go. It was always to Murano, and always to the same landing one of our gondoliers had followed several times, just out of curiosity.
Both the Vecchi, indeed, continue to ply their trade, day and night, at the traghetto. Traghetti are stations for gondolas at different points of the canals. As their name implies, it is the first duty of the gondoliers upon them to ferry people across. This they do for the fixed fee of five centimes. The traghetti are in fact Venetian cab-stands.
Whoever has lifted hand in your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New Year's for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to wish you a bel capo d'anno, with the same practical end in view. On New Year's Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about howling vivas under charitable windows till they open and drop alms.
Gondolas of all sizes were gliding up and down, with their sharp, fishy-looking prows of steel pushing their ways silently among each other, while gondoliers shouted and jabbered, and made as much confusion in their way as terrestrial hackmen on dry land.
As soon as we had passed the custom-house, the gondoliers began to row with a will along the Giudecca Canal, by which we must pass to go to Fusina or to Mestre, which latter place was really our destination. When we had traversed half the length of the canal I put my head out, and said to the waterman on the poop, "When do you think we shall get to Mestre?" "But you told me to go to Fusina."
Dante is the man I owe most to; he taught me more music than all my music-masters put together, and when I wrote my 'Otello, I would introduce those lines of Dante you know the song of the gondolier. My librettist would have it that gondoliers never sang Dante, and but rarely Tasso, but I answered him, 'I know all about that better than you, for I have lived in Venice and you haven't.
"Traitress!" exclaimed the prince, as Strozzi's bucentoro shot ahead, and the red-silk curtains, falling heavily down, shut out the fearful tableau that had been prepared to torture and exasperate him. Laura had swooned, and her fall had been remarked by the gondoliers. "Poor thing," said one of them, "she has a paroxysm of insanity." "How insanity?" asked Conrad.
"He seems to understand you," said poppa meekly. So we dropped Arthur dropped him, so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he should ever come up again. But the Senator's joy in Venice found other means of expressing itself. One was an active and disinterested appeal to the gondoliers to be a little less modern in their costume.
The sentry halted, dropped his gun from his shoulder, and ordered them to go on, while the gondoliers clamored back in the high key of fear, and one of them screamed out to his passengers to do something, saying that, a few weeks before, a sentinel had fired upon a fisherman and killed him. "What's that he's talking about?" demanded Mrs. Vervain.
On leaving this interesting but hapless girl, I proceeded to the house of Steffani. I heard from one of his mother's gondoliers that he had returned to Venice three days before, but that, twenty-four hours after his return, he had gone away again without any servant, and nobody knew his whereabouts, not even his mother.
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