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So the gondoliers on the traghetto began to talk, behind their hands, at first: She had lived in Francesco's house; she had had a dozen young fishermen trapesing after her; her mother, too, was none too good. Then again, you could never trust these Neapolitans, the kitten might be like the cat, etc., etc.
"And may she make thee wiser; for, by thine inventory, which it doth not harm thee to rehearse, thou hast a good memory." "Eccellenza, there is more, if you be not weary. There is the government tax; it takes long to gather ask the gastaldo! There are the soldiers for the navy; how many good men does that leave for the traghetto service?
Dawn was growing over the water, and the gray and oily surface of the lagoon was closely dotted with gondolas, distinct and black in the morning twilight; they came sweeping on from San Nicolò and Castello black and red, breast to breast gathering impetus as they neared the Piazzetta, in numbers which must have left every traghetto of Venice deserted; Nicolotti and Castellani allies, since they never had been friends!
The humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants.
"There is the High Mass, twice in the month; there is the Low Mass every Monday, if you will believe me! There are the priests, for nothing Santa Maria, they are not few! The first fare in the day? always for the Madonna of the traghetto. This maledetto fare of the Madonna suffices for the Madonna's oil, I ask you? Ebbene non!
A calle and traghetto next, a shed with a shrine on its wall, a little neat modern house and the Palazzo Corner with its common new glass, and we are abreast the first of the three Mocenigo palaces, with the blue and white striped posts and gold tops, in the middle one of which Byron settled in 1818 and wrote Beppo and began Don Juan and did not a little mischief.
If you happen to have a <i>traghetto</i> under your window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the interest of the place.
He was, for the moment, wistful that above all described it; that was so large a part of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him, on his traghetto, positively throbbing with his question.
But it was perhaps too much to expect that these poor little traghetto lamps should be more than dimly luminous, since the oil was so largely provided by fines for delinquencies! To light the Madonna.
Slowly, as he wended his way through the many turnings of the narrow calle to Campo San Maurizio, carrying a beautiful Moorish box filled with the pearly shells which the Venetians call "flowers of the Lido," and a bouquet of aromatic carnations for the bambino, he recalled the figure and speech of his Madonna, and they were not those of the maidens whom one might encounter at the traghetto or in the Piazza; there had been a dignity and self-forgetfulness in such perfect harmony with the face that, at the moment, this had seemed entirely natural.
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