In the crooked and bewildering streets of Venice, which open out from the great piazza and lead all over the city, one sees the true life of the people. It is there that the poor congregate. The houses teem with humanity. There the true Venetians are harboured. One comes to know them well, and the manner of life they lead; and so gay and light-hearted are they, it is strange if one does not like them in spite of all their faults. Was there ever more irregularity than in the streets of Venice? All the houses seem to be differently constructed. Some are lofty; others are squat; some have balconies and chimney-pieces thrust out into the street so as almost to touch the houses opposite. Nearly every house has at one time been a palace, and each is in a different stage of decay—houses that have once been the homes of merchant princes, palaces in which perhaps even Petrarch may have feasted,—inhabited now by the poorest of Venetians. The weekly wash flutters from the balconies (the linen of Venice is famed for its whiteness), and frowsy heads appear at Gothic windows. Worms have eaten and rust has corrupted everything destructible. Yet now and then one is astonished at the preservation of certain portions of the buildings. In that labyrinth of streets one never knows what surprise may be in store. You will come across beautiful early-Gothic gateways covered with sculptured relief and inlaid designs of leaves; a fourteenth-century palace with the faint remains of the paintings of some artist with which at one time it must have been covered; lovely remnants of crosses let into the walls; Renaissance wells of the sixteenth century; delicately-carved parapets; a great stone angel standing guardian at some calle head; irregularly twisted staircases of the fifteenth century; a Gothic door with terra-cotta mouldings; and churches without number. Some of the finest architectural gems in Europe are here, and almost every house is invested with a strange history. The place seems inexhaustible. As you walk in those old streets the shadows of the mighty dead go with you—those great men who lived glorious lives for Venice and for art. There is an old-world atmosphere about the streets. They twist and turn, and sometimes are so narrow that there is scarcely room for two people to pass each other; at times they are so dark and still that the scuttling of a rat into the water makes one start. Venice is full of contrasts, full of the unexpected. It is as if Providence, seeing fit that one's eyes should not become satiated with beauty unalloyed, throws in little marring touches—shocks to your feelings, cold douches of water, as it were—in order to give value to the marvellous colouring and antiquity of the water city. For example, from the world of Desdemona, where one can fancy one sees her lean from a traceried window and catch a distant echo of a mellow voice out on the water singing a serenade, it is rather a shock suddenly to find yourself in the piazza of St. Mark. It is easy to lose oneself in the streets of Venice. In a minute you can step from the past to the present, and find yourself among the marbles of St. Mark's and the arcades of the Ducal Palace—in the tourist's Venice, amid glittering shops full of modern atrocities, mosaic jewellery, wood-carving, imitation glass, and what not—Americans and other globe-trotters staring up at St. Mark's, laughing and reading their guide-books.

For all artists and lovers of the picturesque the side streets of Venice—calle, as they are called—are fascinating beyond words. Every house has a character peculiarly its own. Each is in a way unique and totally dissimilar to its fellows; each is proud in the possession of relics of architectural beauties. Every street is made up of magnificent palaces and churches, fine examples of architecture in such rich and varied wealth and diversity of styles that one is almost overpowered. There are old Gothic palaces, venerable specimens of Renaissance or Venetian period. Time indeed has laid heavy hands upon them; but it seems to have augmented their charm. This homely aspect of Venice interests. The old houses and the rickety archways appeal to the observer, if he be not too keen of smell. Here are marvellous and varied combinations of rich colouring—weather-worn bricks, grated windows, and brilliant shutters picturesque and shabby by the lapse of time, and shops half lost in gloom. Most of the houses are of distempered rose-colour at the top and moss-green at the bottom. The sun shines on the roof, and the water laps at the base. There are land-gates and water-gates to most of the houses—one opening upon a canal, the other upon a courtyard.

I lived for six months in Venice, and have seen these streets under every possible aspect. I have seen them in the early morning, at mid-day, in the evening, at night, in the rain, in the sun; and I can never decide at what time of the day they appear most fascinating. Perhaps it is after a rain-shower, when every tone upon the old walls is brought out and accentuated—greys and pale sea-greens and the old Venetian red with which so many of the houses used to be distempered. The shops in Venice are very thickly set. Most of them open right down to the ground, and the wares, which are varied, appear to ooze out into the street. Here is a corn-dealer's shop with open sacks of polenta flour of every shade of yellow; there a green-grocer's shop where vegetables are sold—such a wealth of colour in the piles of tomatoes, vegetable marrows, and great pumpkins cut down the middle to display their orange cores. The richer shops, however, are blocked up several feet high, and have latticed windows.

I love to wander through these streets at night, when the squalor and the misery of Venetian life are hidden by the darkness, and one sees only beauty. Here are subjects for the etcher, for Rembrandt and Frans Hals,—marvellous effects of light and shade. The streets are pitch-dark; there is nothing to mar the lovely fair blue nights of Venice—no vicious shaft of electric light to bleach the colour from the sky. These side streets are lit by the candle and the lamp. Perhaps the most picturesque of all the shops at night are the wine-shops. There one sees, beneath some low blackened doorway, a rich golden-brown interior. In the midst of this golden gloom one dim oil-lamp is burning—the most perfect light possible from the painter's standpoint: by it, the dark faces and gesticulating hands of the men gathered round a table are turned to deep orange. This is all one sees growing from out the encircling gloom—faces, hands, and a few flecks of ruby light, as the glasses are raised. Every shop down these narrow streets has its shrine to the Virgin Mary, with its statuette, its fringes, and its flowers; and at night these shrines are illuminated according to the poverty or the wealth of the proprietor—some have only a tiny dip, others have a candle or a group of candles, while well-to-do folk boast a row of oil-lamps. Rich or poor, each has its offering, its tiny beacon. The children may go without bread, and the mother may lack warm clothing; but the Holy Mother must not be robbed of her due. There is certainly a wonderful simplicity of faith about these people. The cook-shops are fascinating by night. There are innumerable stalls; in fact, nearly all the shopping seems to be done from stalls; even the butchers have open-air stalls. At night chestnut-roasters, toffee-vendors, pumpkin-and-hot-pear men hold full sway. These are generally surrounded by groups of open-mouthed children gazing with delight at the long twisted strings of toffee in the hands of the operator. Almost a still greater attraction to the young folk of Venice is the chestnut-roaster; he generally takes up his position in the courtyards, as does the coffee-roaster. Courtyards seem to be the favourite haunts of the coffee-roasters,—partly, I suppose, because all the doors of the houses round about open into them, and housewives can be easily supplied. They seem to be constantly roasting coffee berries night and day; the whole place reeks with the fragrant odour. They are picturesque by day, these busy workers, but far more picturesque by night, when the gleam of their ovens shows orange in the purple gloom, and the leaping flames light up the faces of the children round about, handsome little faces with a certain grandeur in them—boys with bronze cheeks, dark hair, olive complexions, black eyes, and sometimes a touch of colour in their red flannel caps and their multicoloured patches of garments. There is something barbaric and fine and graceful about them, half-encircled, as they are, by the filmy blue smoke from the ovens. A Venetian Good Friday celebrated in a poor and populous part of Venice at night is most picturesque. The people of the quarter—the coffee-roasters, the cook-shop men, the footmen, and the wine-sellers—arrange to sing a chant in twenty-four verses, a grave and sombre chant following the life of our Lord in His Passion. Each verse takes about five minutes to sing, and there is a pause of equal length between each two verses. During every interval the crowd, who have been quiet, begin to chatter, the men smoke, and the boys rush and tumble. Directly the precentor begins, silence falls upon them once more. Most of the people in that particular quarter subscribe to the erection of a shrine with plenty of candles and little glass lamps. It is a picturesque sight—the yellow light from the altar lamps falling on the group of men and women gathered round the singers and the many heads thrust out of windows and balconies, on the fair, devout, and serious faces of the children, on the handsome women and the bronze-faced men.

All the world in Venice lives out of doors: they breakfast and lunch and dine, all in the open air. All of them live in lodgings or hotels, and principally in the bedrooms, which are for the most part comfortless and dreary,—their only merits are a frescoed ceiling, sometimes really fine and old, and a balcony. One can procure a marvel of a palace in Venice for the cost of a garret in London. There is no real home-life in Venice. Rich and poor, mothers, fathers, children, and servants,—all take their food in the open air. There are restaurants and cafÉs for the well-to-do, endless eating-houses for the poorer classes, and sausage-makers for the gondoliers. Cookshops swarm. There you see great piles of fish and garlic, bowls of broth, polenta, and stewed snails, roast apples, boiled beans, cabbages, and potatoes. Every holiday, every saint's day, has its special dish. Carnival time sets the fashion for beaten cream or panamonlata; at San Martino gingerbread soldiers are popular; and for Christmas time there is candy made with honey and almonds. A certain broth consumed by the very humblest is made from scraps of meat which even the sausage-makers will not use: as may be imagined, the soup is highly flavoured. In the midst of all these stalls and eating-houses it is extraordinary how little there is eaten in Venice,—merely a mouthful here and there,—a kind of light running meal. A Venetian, no matter how rich he might be, would never dream of inviting you to a set meal. There is no heavy food, no cut from the joint. If a Venetian invites you to an entertainment, he will give you a cup of coffee perhaps, or a glass of wine and a biscuit,—rarely more. He will never invite you to eat a great meal; he never takes it himself. The eating-house and the stall appear to be more or less of an excuse for gossip and the meeting of neighbours.

If the streets of Venice are bewitching by night, they are certainly delightful in the early morning. It is then that one receives the most vivid impressions. There is a certain freshness in one's perceptions at the dawn. The poor wretches who make their beds in the streets, or on the steps, or at the base of columns, shake themselves and shamble off. Troops of ragged "facchini" fill the streets, and quarrel noisily over their work. The great cisterns in the market-place are open, and the water is brought round to your house by dealers, stout young girls with broad backs and rosy cheeks; they carry it in two brass buckets attached to a pole, and empty it into large earthenware pots placed ready for its reception in the kitchen. These girls, called "bigolanti," supply the place of water-works. At this hour you see the shops opening like so many flowers before the sun. Butchers set forth their meat; fruit shops, crockery shops, bakers', cheap-clothing, and felt-hat shops, show their various wares. You see peasants at work among vegetables, building cabbages and carrots into picturesque piles, and decorating them with garlic and onions, while their masters are still sleeping on sacks of potatoes. Great barges arrive from Mestre, Chioggia, and Torcello, laden with vegetables and fruit. Eating-houses begin their trade. You see men and women taking their breakfast, and a savoury smell of spaghettis and eels on gridirons fills the air. Gondoliers begin to wash their gondolas, brush their felces, polish the iron of their prows, shake their cushions, and put everything in order for business. Picturesque old women, carrying milk in fat squat bottles, make the round of the hotels and restaurants at this early hour. They are good to look at, with their dark nut-brown faces and dangling gold earrings under their large straw hats. Their figures are much the shape of their bottles; and they bring a pleasant atmosphere into Venice, an atmosphere of fields and clover-scented earth, and milk drawn from the cream-coloured cows. Fishermen, a handsome class, with weather-beaten faces, in blue clothing, come striding down the calle, shallow baskets of fish on their heads. They set up their stalls and display their soles and mackerel, chopping up their eels into sections and crying, "Beautiful, and all alive!" At this hour everyone is making bargains, and the result is a continual buzz; but there is nothing discordant about the street cries of Venice. A peculiarly beautiful cry is that of the man who comes round every morning with wood for your kitchen fire. The fuel-men cut their wood on the shores of the Adriatic, and anchor their barges at the Custom House, leaving them in charge of mongrel yellow dogs, who guard so vigilantly and are so extremely aggressive that never a splinter is taken from the barges.

The street cries are full of individuality, and the tradesman brings a little art to bear on the description of his wares. The song of the sweep, exquisitely sad, quite befits the warning, "Beware of your chimney!" There is nothing gay about the sweep: he is a very melancholy person, and his expression is in sympathy with his music. The pumpkin-vendor is coy, and his cry has a winning pathos; his is not an easy vegetable to launch on the market, and he has developed into a very bashful person. His cry is cooing and subtle: he almost caresses you into buying, which is necessary, as no one in his right senses really desires a pumpkin. The fruiterer is different. He is handsome, fat-cheeked, and has scarlet lips, strong black hair curling in ringlets, and gold rings in his ears. His adjuration is a round, full, resonant roar, like a triumphant hymn; and there is altogether a certain Oriental splendour about his demeanour. It is not necessary for him to be subtle: there is always a sale for melons and pears, chestnuts and pomegranates. He uses colour as a stimulant to his customers, and dwells upon the hue of his fruit. "Melons with hearts of fire!" he cries. Also he flatters. To a dear old gentleman passing by he will hold up a clump of melons, some of them sliced, or a group of richly coloured pomegranates, and say, "Now, you as a man of taste will appreciate this marvellous colour; you are young enough to understand the fire and beauty of these melons"; and the old gentleman will go on his way feeling quite pleased and youthful. Some of the cries are quaint. I once heard a man say, "Juicy pears that bathe your beard!" and another said his peaches were "ugly but good,"—they certainly were not beautiful to look upon. Almost the most melodious salesmen are the countrymen who pace the streets with larks and finches in cages, and roses and pinks in pots.

At mid-day the streets are enveloped in a warm golden light; there are rich old browns, orange yellows, and burnt siennas—all the tints of a gorgeous wall-flower. A ray of sun in a bric-À-brac shop attracts your attention; and you get a peep through a window with cobwebbed panes, high up in a flesh-coloured wall, at some of the objects within,—brass pots and pans gleam from the walls, bits of china and porcelain, strings of glass beads, some quaint old bookcases with saints carved in ivory, fragments of old brocade woven with gold and gorgeous,—all kinds of strange curiosities, looking crisp and brilliant in the sunlight. Suddenly you are blinded by a patch of golden yellow. It is an orange-stall placed before a pink palace flecked with the delicate tracery of luminous violet shadow. Away down in the interior of the stall, where the sun does not shine, it appears almost purple by contrast to the brilliant mass of golden fruit. The background of all these shops is neutral: the objects for sale form the only brilliant and positive colour.

The palaces and houses are mostly pink and white. There are pinks, and greys, and blues, and so on. It is not the painted, coloured city that one had imagined it to be: Venice is very grey. But its greyness is that of the opal and the pearl. I have often heard people say how strange it is that the colours always seem brighter in Venice than in any other city—the shutters and the doors and the shops. The answer is not far to seek. It is because the background and the general colouring is neutral. There are no large patches of positive colour: even St. Mark's, choke-full of colour as it is, has no positive colour in its composition. Take a peep into a carpenter's shop. Through the iron grating, rusty and red with age, you see the quaint old craftsman at work, his flesh tone very much the colour of the wood he is planing; piercing black eyes look through and over the large bone-framed glasses that he wears; he suggests the carpenter of Japan; and, judging from the amount of shavings you see about the floor, you gather that he is a dignified, not what may be called a feverish, worker. He is, however, evidently an artist: you see dainty specimens of wood-carving hung round on the walls. Most of the carpenters of Venice seem to be old men. There appear to be very few middle-aged people at all. They seem to be either young boys and girls or ancient men and women. Whether it is that Venetians age quickly, I do not know. The old women are extraordinary. You can scarcely imagine how anything so crooked and foul and old and frowsy, with so little hair, so few teeth, so many protruding bones, and such parchment-like skin, can be human. Their faces seem to be shrunken like old fruit: I have seen women with noses shrivelled and with dents in them like strawberries. It is extraordinary to watch these women on their shopping excursions. How they bargain! They think nothing of starting the day before to buy a piece of steak, and sometimes spend a whole day haggling over it. Some of the shopmen are swindlers,—fat, greasy men, very fresh and brisk, who have reduced cheating to a fine art.

It is only after living in Venice for some months that one begins to understand the bargaining in the streets. You will see two men talking—one the shopman, the other the purchaser—and if you know anything of the language, and watch carefully, you will find it the most marvellous bit of acting imaginable. They bargain; the customer turns in scorn, and goes; he is called back; the goods are displayed once more, and their merits expatiated upon. The customer laughs incredulously and moves away. The seller then tries other tactics to fog his client. Eventually he makes a low offer, which is accepted; but even then the shopman gets the best of it, for he has a whole battery of the arts of measurement in reserve. There is really no end to the various possibilities of "doing" a man out of a halfpenny.

Beggars are a great trial in the streets. The lame, the halt, and the blind breathe woe and pestilence under your window, and long monotonous whines of sorrow. Fat friars in spectacles and bare feet come round once a month begging bread and fuel for the convents. Old troubadours serenade you with zithers, strumming feebly with fingers that seem to be all bone, and in thin quavering voices pipe out old ditties of youth and love.

There are lottery offices everywhere. Around them there is always a great excitement. The missing number, printed on a card framed in flowers and ribands, is placed in the windows daily. Some say that the system of lottery should be done away with; but it might be cruel to deprive the poor wretches of hope. The lottery brings joy to many despairing people.

Venetian women are good-looking. One sees them continually about the streets. Nothing can surpass the grace of the shawl-clad figures seen down the perspective of the long streets, or about some old stone well in a campiello. They are for the most part smart and clean. You see them coming home from the factories, nearly always dressed in black, simple and well-behaved. Their hair is of a crisp black, and well tended; their manner is sedate and demure. There is no boisterousness about the Venetian girls, no turning round in the streets, no coarseness. Many of them are very beautiful. You see a woman crossing an open space with the sunlight gleaming on the amber beads about her throat and making the rich colour glow brighter beneath her olive skin. A shawl is thrown round her shoulders, and her jet-black hair is fastened by a silver pin. She wears a deep crimson bodice. The choice of colour of these women is unerring in taste. Their shawls are seldom gaudy, generally of blue or pale mauve; vivid colours are reserved for the bodices.

Then, there are the bead-stringers. You see them everywhere: handsome girls with a richness of southern colour flushing beneath warm-toned skins, eyes large and dark, with heavy black lashes, the hair twisted in knots low on their necks, and swept back in large waves from square foreheads, a string of coloured beads round their necks, and flowered linen blouses with open collars. You see them with their wooden trays full of beads. The bead-stringers are nearly always gay. They laugh and chat as they run the beads on the strings. They often form a very pretty picture, as they bend over their work and thread turquoise beads from wooden trays.

In the courtyards, some women are hanging white clothes on a line before a yellow wall; others are leaning out of their windows, gossiping with neighbours. Never was there a more gossiping set of women: every window, every balcony, seems to be thronged with heads thrust out to chatter.

Venice is divided up into campi or squares. Each campo has a church, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick-maker, and everything else that is necessary to life, including a cafÉ and a market.

Venetian children, as a rule, are very badly reared, and many of them die at an early age. It is a belief and a consolation that the little ones go straight to heaven, there to plead their parents' cause and to arrange for their reception.

May is the best month in which to see the streets. The intoxication of spring is in the air, and in the bright sunlight the colours burn and glow. Although you cannot see them, you are constantly reminded that there are gardens in Venice. Suddenly over the red brickwork of a high wall you will see clumps of tamarisk, hanging mauve wisteria, or the scarlet buds of a pomegranate, while the scent of syringa and banksia roses fills the air, the birds sing in the enclosure, and the perfume of honeysuckle trails over the wall of a garden of a foreign prince. Few crowds are more cheerful or better ordered than a Venetian crowd. There is a light-heartedness about these people that is very engaging; they have a marvellous frankness of manner, a sublime indifference to truth. The smallest Venetian child is a born flatterer, and will tell you, not what he thinks, but what he imagines you wish to hear. The people are the most engaging in the world, free from care or doubt as to right or wrong. This carelessness is characteristic of the whole Italian race. Venetians give the impression of being always determined to enjoy life to the full. They are continually coming together, for the purpose of pleasure, on one pretence or another, and the flashes of wit in the street are sometimes very amusing. The Venetians have always been, and still are, a great festa-loving people. When the Republic fell, the brave ceremonies came to an end; but the original passion is still kept alive. The festa in Venice are chiefly of religious character. For example, once a year each parish church honours the feast of its patron saint by processions to all shrines within that particular parish. Very picturesque are the streams of priests and people crossing the bridges and passing along the fondanta of some small canal,—a brilliant ribbon of vermilion and gold winding through the grey-toned city: porters of the church (in blouses of white, red, and blue) bearing candles, pictures, and banners; bands playing the gayest operatic tunes; priests and the parocco carrying the Host under a canopy of cloth of gold; long files of the devout holding candles; and boys with crackers and guns. At night there is dancing in the largest campo of the parish. On Good Friday the streets resemble a feast rather than a fast. The people are in their best and gaudiest clothes; children are rushing and romping and turning somersaults, whirling their rattles, fitting up shrines and then appealing to the crowd for coppers,—human mites of six or seven constructing "Santo Sepolcro," or Holy Graves, from old bottles, sprigs of bay stuck in, and odd candle-ends. One may witness touches of sentiment in a Venetian crowd; but the depths are seldom stirred. Sometimes sentiment finds expression in the rilotti—popular Venetian songs.