Venice was in consternation; ier enemy and strongest rival was at her very gates. A deputation was sent to treat for peace, asking only the liberty of Venice. Doria's historic answer was that Venice should have peace enough when he had "bridled the wild horses" that stand before San Marco. Nothing more was said. Every citizen came magnificently to the rescue; plate and jewels were sold; a a fleet of galleys equipped; and the Queen of the Adriatic prepared to defend herself. Every thing was against her. The troops of Padua (not subdued till 1402) and of Hungary had cut off all communication with the continent. Pisani was called out of prison, and he and the Doge Contarini took the command of the fleet.

Knowing, as the Genoese could not, all the secret channels of the lagoon, the Venetian galleys appeared suddenly before Chioggia-no doubt by the very way we had come this morning-and Contarini prepared his master-stroke. He moored one of his largest ships across this very Chioggia channel; it was attacked furiously by the Genoese, and sunk. Contarini then blocked the channel even more completely by throwing in loads of stone. The Genoese were caught in the lagoon as in a trap. The other exits, especially the canal. towards Venice, were blocked by the Venetians, and in the principal one their own galleys were stationed.

So the two fleets lay for several months, the Genoese trapped in the shallow dangerous lagoon, where yet it was impossible to attack them; and the Venetians watching every movement which threatened their city. It was a tremendous game of cat and mouse, and it lasted nearly a year. Then came reinforcements from the Levant for Contarini, and the Genoese, straitly besieged in Chioggia, were compelled to surrender, with the loss of hundreds of lives and nearly thirty

ships. As even a Genoese historian confesses, God would not suffer so noble a city as Venice to become the spoil of the conqueror.

What heroes they were in those days! It sounds like a tale of Drake and the Armada, but it was two hundred years before his day. It was just a war between two great Italian republics, at a time when England, as a naval power, was an absolutely negligible quantity. How little one realizes those mediaeval days, and how Venice, five and twenty miles away across the lagoon, must have watched and waited all through that terrible year 1379, and wept and prayed as the battle raged at Chioggia!

Here was Chioggia, indeed, in front of us, a mediaeval-looking town built of brown and grey stone and roughlyburnt red brick; massive lines of houses and little bridges over canals; a sort of practical, fisherman's Venice—which indeed it is.

The heat by this time was really tremendous. On the sea, under thick awnings, it was at least endurable, if not enjoyable, but it was neither when we landed on the tarry pier, smelling of stale fish and alive with chattering Chioggians.

Opposite the pier opened one of the widest and finest streets I had ever seen, leading straight up to the Duomo. But we turned to the right, out of the scorching glare, and found ourselves in a narrow street, pervaded by an ancient and more than fish-like smell. Along one side was a sea-canal, in which were drawn up, close to the cobbled pavement, scores and hundreds of the painted boats! It was like coming unexpectedly on a superb collection of butterflies! They were evidently being repaired. Some had folded their red and white wings while their rigging and masts were being overhauled, but most of the sails were unfurled, and a number of them were lying over the cobblestones, where we were able to watch the

operation of patching to our heart's content! Men and women and even children, barefooted and picturesque, swarmed over the pavement and sat in the cockleshell boats, with lengths of rusty red and vivid yellow sail-cloth. Men, armed with long spears of needles and yards of tarry twine, were sitting crosslegged in the full glare of the sun, sewing long brick-shaped patches over imaginary holes-pale-blue on to a burnt sienna sail-black to ochre, white to saffron, dull yellow to rusty orange-each unerring harmony a perfect chord of color. It took us more than twenty minutes to get to the end of that fascinating street-which really was a "fondamenta," though the houses on our left were mere ruinous outbuildings. At last we found ourselves in a broad open space just outside the fine old city gate, which now stands pathetic and solitary. Beyond was the open country, flat and sunbaked, but we were too tired to explore. Instead, we sat on the deep marble benches in the cool grey arch, with thanksgiving, watched some twine-makers in a shed outside, and wondered where we had better lunch. Some one remembered having seen quite a decent restaurant down near the quay, at the other end of the main street, and we made our way there gradually, paying a visit to the Duomo, ice-cool and shadowy, as we passed it. There was an air of departed grandeur and a sort of aloofness about the broad street-and, indeed, the whole placewhich was pathetic. However, yielding to my unconquerable desire for getting off the beaten track, I persuaded my friends to follow me over an old red bridge across a canal, through an opening between the houses, and we found ourselves in another long narrow street skirting the water, evidently a market. All the shops had turned their contents on to the pavement; there were piles of yellow and black grain, sacks of maize flour for polenta, huge trays of a

weird preparation of slimy things in oil, at which we glanced shuddering, trying to believe that they were not snails. There was a quantity of unshelled shell-fish (highly odoriferous), enormous crabs, and mountains of boiled shrimps and prawns, besides little silvery fish. Then there were mounds of cabbages and potatoes, and late oranges; tin-smiths' shops, twine shops, and shops where you could buy clothes.

if you wanted to-and numbers of dirty little caffès and trattorie. Best of all, a few delightful pottery stalls. wanted something to hold paint-water, and fell an instant victim to the lovely little roughly painted, exquisitely shaped earthenware jugs which a solemn, blackheaded man was selling at a penny each. I can only attribute it to the heat that I did not buy his entire stock, which he was selling with a degree of detachment which amounted to positive indifference! Mine was palest yellow, the color of the clay, with lines and leafshaped daubs of transparent greenthe only Italian jug I have ever seen which would pour!

We had lunch,"al fresco,"in the pretty garden behind the restaurant under a huge acacia; and until the boat arrived we all strolled down to some curious old grass-grown fortifications at the water's edge, where was a mighty square stone tower and long ruined walls. Here some of us, in a comfortable angle of the fallen wall, watched for the boat with closed eyes.

***

A faint trail of smoke on the horizon resolved itself gradually into a funnel and a big black steamboat, and in twenty minutes we were off, Chioggia sinking into the sea behind us. Its coloring, lovely as it was, had lost the brilliance of the morning; the pearly haze was threatening to thicken and swell the faint masses of sullen, fierytinted thunder-clouds on the southern horizon. But before us the sky was clear, and as we passed the first of the

little shrines of Our Lady, with which the lagoon near Venice is dotted, a delicious breeze was blowing and it was a perfect afternoon.

Charming and pathetic are those quaint little shrines, rising on tall posts, or the corner of a jutting wall, straight out of the water. A tiny lamp, sometimes swung from an iron bracket of graceful design, burns before the picture or weatherworn image of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, St. George-that ever popular friend of Venetians-or il Santo -Antony the miracle-worker, the Saint of saints throughout all Northern Italy -sheltered by a little rough wooden penthouse, and generally decorated with a handful of flowers.

Here, in the dusk of summer evenings or the silvery radiance of a moonlight night, you may see, standing or kneeling in their "butterfly" boats, drawn up at the foot of the shrine, big bronzed fishermen, rosaries in their hands, with perhaps a bunch of roses from the Lido for Our Lady, or lilies. (the saint's own special flower) for St. Anthony's shrine and in their hearts the faith of a little child. Then they will push off, lighting their pipes, and fish all night long, and at dawn their spoil will be poured forth like silver in the Rialto market. But and this is the advice of a friend-buy it not, nor eat it in any form whatsoever, for in Venice fish is a doubtful, if not a deadly, luxury to any one who is not a Venetian. They are inured to it.

Venice, lying like a faint ribbon of cloud on the horizon, gradually became manifest as a city of softest rose-pink and grey, deepening into tender misty purple, flecked here and there with white, spiked with sharp, slender campanili, the city of a dream, growing every moment clearer and yet more clear, as we threaded our way between the frequent islands, passing the great monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore on its historic island, and entering at last

upon the ordered confusion of the harbor. Here floated a group of the butterfly-boats, demurely at anchor close to the huge yacht of an American millionaire. At the Riva Schiavoni gathered a bustling crowd of sea-going steamboats and fussy important "vaporetti," while right across the picture the sweet fresh hay from a couple of heavily laden barges trailed in the lapping water, its fragrance overpowering the scent of the sea. Sunshine, sweet air, and much water, and behind it all the Doge's Palace, the mighty columns of the Piazzetta, the domes of glorious San Marco,.each crowned with its manyarmed golden cross.

***

There was a long pause. "You're asleep!" I said.

Then:

"No," he said, "no-not quite!" He sat up, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. (We were sitting under the cedars in a July garden.)

"Well, do you see what I mean now?" "Yes," he said slowly, "I see what you mean."

"And you understand about the 'atmosphere'?"

"I didn't say that. I said I saw what you meant. In fact, it is perfectly obvious. It's the color-the artistic side of it all that you mistake for 'atmosphere' in the Catholic sense.".

I got up with dignity and began to walk across the lawn.

"There's one thing I do understandreally!" he cried, penitently.

Curiosity prevailed over dignity. "What is that?" I inquired coldly. "That you are hopelessly in love with Italy."

"You don't understand in the least," I said, resuming my interrupted progress. As I reached the veranda his voice reached me once more: "There are flats to be had in Venice-" he called.

There are some people to whom it is useless to explain anything!

P

ROBABLY it was due to his mother's prayers rather than to any merit on his part that

Tom had grown to young manhood, made his way to a good position in a big city, far from home, and had remained a good, clean boy. As he sprawled on the beach in the sunlight, shaking the salt water out of his hair and turning his well-featured but somewhat sensitive face to the sun, passersby cast more than casual glances toward him. For Tom had the three most precious gifts of heaven to mankind-youth, health and a clean conscience.

Near him on the sand sat Margaret, beautiful not only in Tom's eyes but in those of all who saw her. Her soft yellowish hair escaped in little ringlets from under her close-fitting cap, to be tossed by the wind, while her black satin bathing costume revealed the soft lines of her figure.

Tom thought that she had never looked so well, never half so attractive. He mentally compared the present with previous meetings: he recalled how she had looked in her yellow evening gown when he was first introduced at the club dance; on the motor-boat trip, in a trim white suit. Each time she had seemed more wonderful and each time the vision of her had photographed itself more deeply upon his mind.

Her hand was not far from his on the sand. He reached over to take it and then drew back.

"If she were only a Catholic," mused the boy.

She seemed to have no fixed religious belief. More than once Tom had approached the subject of his faith, but

always with a boy's timidity, fearing to go too far, to show an outsider what was in his heart.

He wanted her, did this boy-wanted her with every throb of his pulse, with every thought of his mind.

"Maybe it would not matter. Catholics sometimes marry non-Catholics and are happy," he thought.

He was about to speak, about to ask the oldest question in the world.

"Can't we go into the water once more?" the girl broke into his thoughts. Intuition had told her that he was thinking of her, and she felt, as did the boy, that there was a barrier between them, although she knew not what it was.

So that day drew to its close with the question unasked, as did another, and another that they spent together. Tom thought of her at work; he thought of her when he went to early Mass of a Sunday morning.

Never before had he realized what his religion meant to him, for never before had it been put to a test. He understood, kneeling in the church at the Holy Sacrifice, what it might mean to him to have for his life-companion one to whom his most solemn and sacred thoughts would have no meaning.

Perhaps he might convert her? That, too, had presented itself to Tom as a possible solution of the problem. But he felt unequal to explaining adequately to another the meaning of a faith which he had never questioned and the grounds for which he had never studied sufficiently. He feared to take the risk. What if he should lose her? What if this radiant creature, who was becoming more and more to him with every pass

ing day, should draw away from him if he attempted to force his faith on her? Remember, Tom was not a theologian. He was merely a normal, happy, well-educated boy, content with his day's work and his day's play.

"I am praying for you, my son, praying that Our Lady may help you out of your perplexity," his mother had written him.

With that heaven-given instinct that only a mother has, she knew that her boy had a problem, although he had never written to her about it.

Came autumn and a Sunday afternoon. Tom and Margaret took their places in the endless stream of humanity that edged the Avenue. The tonic of the early fall was in the air. It was good to be alive. It was good to have Margaret by him.

Tall over the tops of the houses towered the spires of the great cathedral and its hospitable doors were wide flung for Vespers.

"Would you like to go in?" ventured Tom. "It's my church, you know."

They made their way up the long aisle and took seats in a pew well to ward the front. The Vesper service. was nearing its close and Benediction. was beginning. Like a star in the cenLike a star in the centre of the high altar, reflecting in its golden brilliance the hundreds of candle lights that twinkled around it, stood the monstrance. Banks of flowers were at either side, while the delicate fragrance of the incense floated down over the solemn coped figures of the clergy.

The clear bell-like voice of a boy singer rose over the music of the organ in the centuries-old but ever-young "Lauda Sion." Tom had heard that wonderful hymn of prayer and exultation many times before; he knew every line of it, but carried a new meaning to him that day.

Tu qui cuncta scis et vales.

Tom followed the words in unspoken prayer: "Thou who knowest all, dear God, Thou knowest the desire of my heart, Thou knowest my love and Thou art all-powerful."

Tu nos bona fac videre
Tuos ibi commensales.

"Make us, dear God-not me alone but her, as well-partakers with Thee; not alone, let me share my faith."

In terra viventium.

"Heaven may be the fulfillment of all, but we are here in this glorious world, now. Make us partakers with Thee'in terra viventium'-in the land of the living.'

The organ died away into silence. A whisper broke on Tom's prayer.

"Tom," it was Margaret's voice. He leaned toward her. She was kneeling. "Tom, dear, didn't you know? My mother was a Catholic and I was baptized one."

The boy reached for her hand. It was waiting. Both bowed their heads for the blessing of Him who worked His first miracle at a wedding feast.

The preacher's text that afternoon was "Love is the fulfilling of the Law."

"Signs in the stars," He said, Against the Day of Dread: And once before-a star Gave sign, but not of war.

O star of Christmas night,
Hath gone thy peaceful light?
And will it be thy rays
Will sign the Day of days?