Within doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for an instant. Before the winter passed I had changed my habitation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest street in Venice passes, from St. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest campos (? campi) of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke and the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society. Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a mercer's and draper's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffè, more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery, nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop, where you buy and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood carver's and gilder's; while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto Market. In Venice the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares, and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper of hair-pins, is much worse than the anvil chorus with the real anvils. Fishermen with baskets of fish upon their heads; pedlars with trays of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertise cement for mending broken dishes and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic on the ground; organists who ground their organs: and poets of the people, who brought out new songs and sang and sold them to the crowd;-these were the children of confusion whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo. Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out the meaning of the different cries and to trace them back to their sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time, a sharp pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and rising high above all the rest, impressed the spirit, like the cry of that bird in the tropic forests, the same which the terrified Spaniards call the alma perdida. After many weeks listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded from a wretched sun-burnt girl, who carried about some dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung dishevelled about her eyes, blood-shot with the strain of incessant shriek. In San Bartolomeo, as in other campos, the buildings are palaces above and shops below. The ground floor is devoted to the small commerce of various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by tradesmen's families; and in the third and fourth floors are the appartemento signorila. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of innumerable birds-finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots-which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was occupied as an hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all odds the most interesting figure was that of the stout servant girl, a contadina, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckkerchief, and a bright coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings of yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony rail in perusal of the people under her; and I suspect made love at that distance and in that constrained position to some one in the crowd. On another balcony a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn, and at the balcony of still another house a damsel now looked out upon the campo, and now gave a glance into the room in the evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbours have the amiable custom of studying one another's features through opera-glasses; but I could not persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror's response to the damsel's constant "fair or not?" being a believer in every woman's right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo beneath; to the placid, placid dandies about the door of the caffé; to the tide of passers-by, the Merceria, the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed white-faced Venetian girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly clad and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily-burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about, with their swords at their sides and in their spotless Austrian uniforms. As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive delight which hails its coming passes into a tranquil humour, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into the city's heart for utterance. I too felt this longing for quiet, and as San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared and thundered under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to sleepless giovanotti, who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was obliged to abandon San Bartolomeo and seek calmer quarters, where I might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of the springtime in peace. Now, with the city's lapse into this tranquiller humour the promenades cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and in the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a square of about six feet on the Riva dei Schiavoni which does not bear its browncloaked contadino basking face downwards in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by rights the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated by the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamours at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard of valets-de-place. Even the play of the children ceases, except in the public gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games and sport as noiselessly as the lizards, that slide from shadow to shadow and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses you, the stranger in it, not with sadness, not with melancholy, but with a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on men's tongues, behold that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise would strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost heart, and you learn her secrets,-arcana unintelligible to you in the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new colour and meaning. The mystical indolent poems, whose music charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion. Now at last you know why "It was an Abyssinian maid" who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadee, it was the land in which you were born. Through rifts of flying fancies you behold the old blue sky of childhood where Heaven used to be; and Titian's child-virgin no longer ascends the temple steps in Jerusalem to meet the high priest, but, shining in that halo with which the master's hand has clothed her, mounts the stairs that rose in De Quincey's trance from the window of the cathedral on mighty organ tones into unfathomable depths of glory and light. The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail faints into the white distance; the gondola slide athwart the sheeted silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes at his post. (To be continued.) TABLE BAY BREAKWATER. Some very questionable information has been sent us about the Breakwater forming in Table Bay, Cape of Good Hope. Pile work for a pier in that part of the world cannot be expected to withstand the worm, and we are surprised such a resort should have been admitted. However the Cape Government is old enough to take care of itself, and prevent their pier from being mutilated; aad if it looks to permanent advantages in such an important work as the protection of a harbour for shipping, they must use permanent materials to secure it, or content themselves to let it go by with the stream of time into early imbecility, while other harbours of the colony are prospering and securing those advantages which follow good works, but which to them will be lost. We read that the Legislature has passed a vote of another £20,000 towards the prosecution of the harbour works, in spite of the opposition of one or two members, Messrs. Wathen and Robinson especially, who demand an inquiry as to the state of the works and the suitability of the plan. The burgesses of Durban are astir in this matter once more, and in two days 196 signatures were appended to a petition against the Bill passing the third reading. It has passed, however, and now a memorial to the Governor has been forwarded, with a copy of the petition to the Council, praying him to accept it as addressed to himself. Yesterday a party of burgesses inspected the works for themselves. It may be very well for honourable members to throw a doubt upon the genuineness of specimens of worm-eaten timber, brought from the breakwater, and laid on their table; but at least they should not shut their eyes to conviction. Let them, at least, not refuse inquiry; and if they doubt the genuineness of the specimens before them, either inspect for themselves or let a commission do it for them. Se They would then find that the timbers of the piers, both north and south, are in scores of cases pierced and perforated till they resemble sponge, and crumble in the hand. Failure is written on the face of the scheme in characters so plain and unmistakeable, that only wilful blindness and perverse obstinacy can refuse to see it. And the presumption of the self-constituted engineer, while professing to carry out Captain Vetch's plan, is such that they now, on the suggestion of some unknown and irresponsible projector, propose to alter it in three important particulars, all integral and essential parts of his scheme. First, they do away with the southern breakwater altogether. condly, they propose to drive piles instead of putting down compartments framed together, and filled up at once with stone. And, thirdly, the leading idea of Vetch's scheme, the carrying out the head of the two piers into thirty feet water, is also abandoned, and the one pier will terminate in twenty or twenty-two feet water. Yet with all these stupendous changes in Vetch's stupendous plan, the Colonial Secretary, is asking for another £20,000, in the most matter of course way, says, "there is nothing to explain !" Some of the honourable members propose to do away with the practice of reading prayers before their sittings, or at least to let it be done by proxy. A bitter wag thinks they begin to find themselves past praying for. The Mercury of Saturday contains the testimony from a mechanic of the highest respectability as to the state in which he found Vetch's breakwater, and it more than amply bears out the statement of the memorial on the subject, and fully justifies a remark made by Mr. Wathen in the Council, when opposing the vote of £20,000 the other day, for carrying on the works. The honourable gentleman thought accommodation for lunatics was far more urgently required! HOMEWARD BOUND. PART I. (Continued from page 540.) "Tis under cover of the "stilly" night, A lawful prize 'tis true, and doom'd to die, While in the sun, as quietly they sleep Hurls his barb'd spear that takes the curve he gave, Which thus impaled quick downward leaves his track; With line attach'd, from which it cannot part,— Nor is this all, others are sleeping caught, The hawkbill turtle is the favor'd kind, That yields a shell with beauteous marks combin'd. * Some inaccuracies appearing in the last page of the lines, we have repeated some for our correspondent Nemo. |