246 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
the poet hath it though it was night. The blue was dark but blue, and the more blue for the one or two silvery stars that twinkled about the silent reflective moon. The queen of night was surely contemplating the queen of cities. " We are the two queens of the world," it might have been saying, so high, so lofty, so dignified, so proud, she looked up in the heavens ; and so majestic, so pathetically majes- tic looked the dreamy city of the sea, where moon and palaces glassed themselves in the calm waters.
The one or two gondolas that accompanied our friends when they started, disappeared mysteriously round bends of the Grand Canal, where lamps glimmered now and then in a half-hearted kind of competition with lighted windows that sent streaks of gleaming darts or broad beams of yel- low down into the deep, making the rippling wavelets that accompanied the gondola rise and fall with splashes of color that had the effect of molten gold. But this was only momentary ; the gondola slipped and stole along, like some shadowy boat in some imaginary city, where the palaces rose like architectural spectres out of the bosom of the dreaming waters.
Philip pressed Dolly's band. She responded faintly. Somehow she felt inclined to cry. Walter had lighted a cigar; he had one arm around his wife ; he was thinking of the supper he had ordered, and wondering whether he would ask Beppo to stay and take them out later.
There was music on the water far away. It fell upon their ears like the moaning of an ^Eolian harp. From one of the palace windows there came the ripple of laughter. Beneath the balcony there shot forth from a little canal, a gondola gaily lit with lamps ; it sped away with great swift- ness, and Philip watched the fading lights until they disap- peared as if the sea had swallowed them. How solemnly beautiful it all was !
Palaces on either hand, carrying the mind back to the
