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The day had a melancholy cast in the narrow waterways of Murano, where clouds of smoke, dense and constant, rose from hundreds of glass-workers' chimneys, dimming the reflections in the lagoon and obscuring that wonderful coloring of sky which is nowhere so radiant as at Venice.

But the shadow of the coveted Lion's paw had suddenly overclouded him and changed his mood. When the first faint flush of dawn was waking in the east, the fair, sweet face of Marina of Murano was outlined for the last time, vague as some dream memory, against the deep shadows of the interior, between the quaint columns that framed her window.

Moreover Hossein's wife, always invisible but ever near, had a marvellous gift for making fruit sherbets, cooled with the snow that was brought down daily from the mountains on the mainland in dripping bales covered with straw matting. Loredan and Mocenigo were already there, as Foscari had anticipated, eating pistachio nuts and sipping sherbet through rice straws out of tall glasses from Murano.

"Hark thee, Zanetto," said she to me, "I will not be loved in the French manner; this indeed will not be well. In the first moment of lassitude, get thee gone: but stay not by the way, I caution thee." After dinner we went to see the glass manufactory at Murano. She bought a great number of little curiosities; for which she left me to pay without the least ceremony.

"It is the grandson of Messer Girolamo Magagnati, of the Stabilimenti!" they cried from the barges of Murano, surging nearer in the waterway. "He belongs to us to the people!" for the story was well known, and the people of Venice were not less proud than the nobles who ruled them. "Viva Messer Magagnati!"

Father Dalzano, the vicar of the monastery of S. Peter Martyr at Murano, gave the Florentine monk a commission for a picture of the value of seventy or 100 ducats.

Ruskin had visited Torcello by this time, and was ordering his gondoliers to take him to Murano. It occurred to him, as he glided over the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery of such as Leonard. "Oh, Margaret," cried her aunt next morning, "such a most unfortunate thing has happened.

She had looked at the palaces she had passed in Venice that morning, some in shadow, some in sunlight, some with gay faces and some grave, but all so different from the big old house in Murano, that she did not wish to live in them at all. It would have been much easier to submit if she had been betrothed to a foreigner, a Roman, or a Florentine.

It was not until four years later that Murano was delighted to recognize in the husband of his long-lost daughter a very rich cattle-owner in Southern California, called Jarman; but he never knew that he had been an escaped convict from Sydney, who had lately received a full pardon through the instrumentality of divers distinguished people in Australia.

Therefore she refused to go to America, and so much did my uncle love Anita that he would not stay there without her. Back he came and worked once more at Murano. Then the father and mother died, and my uncle and Anita were married and went to the United States. They wanted to take me, but I pretended that I would rather remain here.