STREETS OF VENICE
Mrs. Sprague looked from one child to the other. The girl was eager,
the boy expectant. "He is no older than you are, Edith," she said at
last. "It isn't possible that he can be a good guide. There will be
three lost, instead of two as there were yesterday, if he tries to
pilot us through these crooked lanes."
The day before, Edith had hired an Italian lad to act as a guide, when
she had wished to buy an Italian flag and could find none in the shops
near the Piazza. She had made her wish known, by signs, to one of the
young boys idling at the base of the Lion's Column. He could speak no
English, but Edith showed him a tiny American flag which she carried
in her purse.
"Viva America!" she said, waving the flag with one hand. Then she
waved the empty hand, saying, "Viva l'Italia!" and asked very loudly,
as if he might be deaf, "Where to buy?" pointing to the flag.
The boy nodded that he understood, and led the girl and her mother
across the Piazza and under the old Clock Tower, in which the clock
has been marking the hours ever since Columbus discovered America.
Beyond the tower he led them through short streets and narrow lanes to
a remote, wretched part of the city.
Although Venice is called the City of the Sea, and has hundreds of
canals, there is also a network of narrow streets and lanes threading
the islands on which the city is built. It is possible to walk
anywhere by following these streets and crossing the bridges, and each
house has a land-gate as well as a water-gate.
One of these lanes led at last into a small square. A low, narrow
doorway opened into a dark room, looking out upon a dirty little
canal,--far away from the rose-colored, marble-paved Square of St.
Mark--and here Edith found her Italian flag.
The room was cluttered with old rubbish; and a dozen ragged,
hungry-looking men and women sat idly about on broken chairs.
The boy told his errand in Italian to one of the men, who answered him
in an angry tone. They disputed together for several moments, and then
the man brought a small flag from a far corner of the room. The bright
red, green and white stripes of the flag were in good proportion, but
it was made of a cheap, flimsy material.
"I don't care for it," said Edith, putting her hands behind her and
shaking her head.
Immediately everybody in the room began to talk loudly, which so
frightened Mrs. Sprague that she took out her purse and asked, "How
much?"
The boy held up four fingers. "Quattro lire," he said.
"Four lire!" exclaimed Edith indignantly; "that is almost one dollar,
and it isn't worth ten cents."
But the excited Italian voices were all speaking at once, and so
angrily that Mrs. Sprague dropped the money into an old chair, and
seizing the flag with one hand and Edith with the other, she backed
quickly out into the open air.
She forgot that she knew nothing about the way to her hotel, and,
without waiting for the boy, crossed the first bridge she saw, and
struck into another narrow lane. She was too anxious as to her
whereabouts to notice the interesting sights in the streets through
which she hurried; but Edith, with a girl's curiosity, saw everything.
In a small square at one end of a bridge, a woman leaned from an upper
window and lowered a basket to the pavement below. A man with a basket
of fried fish on his arm took a piece of money from the woman's basket
and put in its place a fish from his own. Then he returned to a
little shed near-by, where a woman was frying onions and fish in oil,
on several charcoal stoves.
As they crossed another bridge, they saw a woman lean from a window to
splash her baby up and down in the canal for his daily bath. The baby
was tied to the end of a long rope which his mother gently raised and
lowered, and he laughed with glee every time he hit the water with his
chubby fists.
Edith wished to stop and watch this curious bath, but Mrs. Sprague
hurried her along, and they soon reached a part of the city where many
people were moving toward a church. As they neared the building, the
leather curtain, which hangs at the entrance to Italian churches, was
pushed aside, and a stream of men, women and children began coming
out, each one carrying a candle.
The children had little candles, the grown people carried larger ones;
and everyone stopped to buy cakes from old women seated near the
church door.
After crossing many bridges, and passing many churches, Edith and her
mother suddenly entered the Piazza of St. Mark, which had grown so
familiar to them both that it was like walking into their own home.
"I shall not go out of sight of it again," said Mrs. Sprague, with a
sigh of great relief.
But Edith longed to explore those bewildering back lanes for more of
the strange foreign sights. "After we get home to America," she said,
"we shall see no more boys selling glasses of water at odd corners;
nor shall we see women frying cakes in the streets, and mothers
bathing their babies in the canals. If we can only find some one who
understands English, we shall have no more trouble."
Now that she had found Rafael, she urged her mother to employ him. "He
can speak both English and Italian," she said, "and can be our
interpreter."
Mrs. Sprague shook her head and was turning away, when the boy spoke,
and held her attention. "The golden spinner is the smallest of all my
tops," he said, "but it does the best work. Why not let me try?"
The lady looked at his earnest face and smiled. "Very well," she said,
"we will go through the Doge's palace with you. We can't get lost
there."
Rafael gathered his tops together and turned them over to one of the
boys. "Keep them for me, Nicolo," he said, and led the way at once to
the beautiful entrance just beyond the corner of the cathedral--the
entrance to the most magnificent of all the fine palaces in Venice.