I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake
transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of
the cross. I hope it will do you good. Also, I have been up among the
galleries of St. Mark's, and about the roof and the west front where
somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.
The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate
every time we come. I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three
pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other
fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they
take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian
beggars--and the cleanest.
Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I think less for the sake of
giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first
floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself. I have no idea for
measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and
perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed roof, windows at
each end, and portieres along the walls of old blue Venetian linen: a
place in which it seems one could only live and think nobly. His face
seems to respond to its teachings. What more might not an environment
like that bring out in you? Come and let me see! I have hopes springing
as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is
what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph.
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