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The only hope rests with the Venetians themselves. They have restored the scarred Library, and are rebuilding the Campanile, with a reverence for the things which made their past glorious that commands the respect of the artistic world. The gondola is as much a part of Venice as its sunsets, pigeons, and palaces. Let them by special license keep the Tragfaetti intact, with their shuttles of gondolas crossing bade and forth–then, perhaps, the catastrophe may be deferred for a few decades.

*****

As it was in Dort and Papendrecht so it is in Venice. Except these beastly, vile-smelling boats there is nothing new, thank God. Everything else is faded, weather-worn, and old, everything filled with sensuous beauty–sky, earth, lagoon, garden wall, murmuring ripples–the same wonderful Venice that thrills its lovers the world over.

And the old painters are still here–Walter Brown, Bunce, Bompard, Faulkner, and the rest–successors of Ziem and Rico–men who have loved her all their lives. And with them a new band of devotees–Monet and Louis Aston Knight among them. “For a few days,” they said in explanation, but it was weeks before they left–only to return, I predict, as Jong as they can hold a brush.

As for Luigi and me–we keep on our accustomed way, leading our accustomed lives. Seventeen years now since he bent to his oar behind my cushions–twenty-six in all since I began to idle about her canals. It is either the little canal next the Public Garden, or up the Giudecca, or under the bronze horses of San Marco; or it may be we are camped out in the Piazzetta before the Porta della Carta; or perhaps up the narrow canal of San Rocco, or in the Fruit Market near the Rialto while the boats unload their cargoes.

All old subjects and yet ever new; each has been painted a thousand times, and in as many different lights and perspectives. And yet each canvas differs from its fellows as do two ripples or two morning skies.

For weeks we drift about. One day Carlotta, the fishwife up the Fondamenta della Pallada, makes us our coffee; the next Luigi buys it of some smart cafe on the Piazza. This with a roll, a bit of Gorgonzola, and a bunch of grapes, or half a dozen figs, is our luncheon, to which is added two curls of blue smoke, one from Luigi’s pipe and the other from my cigarette. Then we fall to work again.

But this will never do! While I have been loafing with Luigi not only has the summer slipped away, but the cool winds of October have crept down from the Alps. There are fresh subjects to tackle–some I have never seen. Athens beckons to me. The columns of the Parthenon loom up!

*****

If there are half a dozen ways of getting into Papendrecht–there is only one of reaching Athens–that is, if you start from Venice. Trieste first, either by rail or boat, and then aboard one of the Austrian Lloyds, and so on down the Adriatic to Patras.

It is October, remember–when every spear of grass from a six months’ drought–the customary dry spell–is burnt to a crisp. It will rain to-morrow, or next week, they will tell you–but it doesn’t–never has in October–and never will. Strange to say, you never miss it–neither in the color of the mountains flanking the Adriatic or in any of the ports on the way down, or in Patras itself. The green note to which I have been accustomed–which I have labored over all my life–is lacking, and a new palette takes its place–of mauve, violet, indescribable blues, and evanescent soap-bubble reds. The slopes of the hills are mother-of-pearl, their tops melting into cloud shadows so delicate in tone that you cannot distinguish where one leaves off and the other begins.

And it is so in Patras, except for a riotous, defiant pine–green as a spring cabbage or a newly painted shutter–that sucks its moisture from nobody knows where–hasn’t any, perhaps, and glories in its shame. All along the railroad from the harbor of Patras to the outskirts of Athens it is the same–bare fields, bare hills, streets and roads choked with dust. And so, too, when you arrive at the station and take the omnibus for the Grand Bretagne.