Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer,
nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to
comfort the disconsolate beast: but _la bete humaine_ has got the
whip-hand of the situation. In another picture is a parrot that has just
mimicked a dog, or called "Carlo!" and then laughed: the dog turns his
head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog
does when you make fun of him.
These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite
glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to
distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the
Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!
Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What
I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I
write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you
to share everything.
Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!
Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I
think you have some southern blood in you.
Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you
are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine gods of my
ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a
foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N.
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