A Wanderer in Venice Part 28

Here we overtake boats on the way to the Rialto market, some hastening with oars, others allowing their yellow sails to do the work, heaped high with vegetables and fruit. Just off the mud the sardine catchers are at work, waist high in the water.

The sun has now gone, the sky is burning brighter and brighter, and Venice is to be seen: either between her islands or peeping over them.

S. Spirito, now a powder magazine, we pa.s.s, and S. Clemente, with its barrack-like red buildings, once a convent and now a refuge for poor mad women, and then La Grazia, where the consumptives are sent, and so we enter the narrow way between the Giudecca and S. Giorgio Maggiore, on the other side of which Venice awaits us in all her twilight loveliness.

And disembarking we are glad to be at home again. For even an afternoon's absence is like an act of treachery.

And here, re-entering Venice in the way in which, in the first chapter, I advised all travellers to get their first sight of her, I come to an end, only too conscious of how ridiculous is the attempt to write a single book on this city. Where many books could not exhaust the theme, what chance has only one? At most it can say and say again (like "all of the singing") how it was good!

Venice needs a whole library to describe her: a book on her churches and a book on her palaces; a book on her painters and a book on her sculptors; a book on her old families and a book on her new; a book on her builders and a book on her bridges; a book--but why go on? The fact is self-evident.

Yet there is something that a single book can do: it can testify to delight received and endeavour to kindle an enthusiasm in others; and that I may perhaps have done.

NEW BOOKS BY E.V. LUCAS

A "MOVING-PICTURE NOVEL"

*Landmarks*

BY E.V. LUCAS, Author of "Over Bemerton's," "London Lavender," etc.

Mr. Lucas' new story combines a number of the most significant episodes in the life of the central figure; in other words, those events of his career from early childhood to the close of the book which have been most instrumental in building up his character and experience. The episodes are of every kind, serious, humorous, tender, awakening, disillusioning, and they are narrated without any padding whatever, each one beginning as abruptly as in life; although in none of his previous work has the author been so minute in his social observation and narration. A descriptive t.i.tle precedes each episode, as in the cinema; and it was in fact while watching a cinema that Mr. Lucas had the idea of adapting its swift selective methods to fiction.

*Lucas's Annual*

Mr. E.V. Lucas has had the happy idea of making a collection of new material by living English authors which shall represent the literature of our time at its best. Among the contributors are Sir James Barrie, who writes in the character of an Eton boy; Mr. Arnold Bennett, with a series of notes and impressions; Mr. Austin Dobson, with a characteristic poem; F. Anstey, with a short story; Mr. John Galsworthy, with a fanciful sketch; Mr. Maurice Hewlett, with a light poem; Mr. Hugh Walpole, with a cathedral town comedy; "Saki," with a caustic satire on the discursive drama; Mr. Stephen Leac.o.c.k, the Canadian humorist, with a burlesque novel; Mr. Lucas himself, and Mr. Ernest Bramah, the author of _The Wallet of Kai Lung_, with one of his gravely comic Chinese tales.

Mr. Lucas, furthermore, has had placed at his disposal some new and extremely interesting letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin and Robert Browning, which are now made public for the first time.

OTHER WORKS BY E.V. LUCAS.

A Wanderer in Florence

A Wanderer in London

A Wanderer in Holland

A Wanderer in Paris

Mr. Ingleside

Listener's Lure

Over Bemerton's

London Lavender

Loiterer's Harvest

Landmarks

One Day and Another

Fireside and Sunshine

Character and Comedy

Old Lamps for New

The Hambledon Men

The Open Road

The Friendly Town

Her Infinite Variety

Good Company

The Gentlest Art

The Second Post

A Little of Everything

Harvest Home

The Best of Lamb

A Swan and Her Friends

The British School

Highways and Byways in Suss.e.x

Anne's Terrible Good Nature

The Slowcoach