334 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
By this time the sun was really getting up in the heavens. The sky was beginning to turn blue. Distant mountains came nearer.
" Lower the boat, boys," said the bravest of the three men. " I will fasten a line to the ghost! "
The helmsman crossed himself as he lent a hand to his mates, and presently the boat was slipping to the stern where the second man dropped into her and began to pull towards the strange figure " r hich seemed to be literally playing with the waves.
" Yes," said the Chioggia fisherman as he approached it, " gold lace sure enough, but what a face ! and, mercy on us, how dead-alive it looks with its hands waving up and down. Ahoy, mate, heave to ! " with which exclamation of personal encouragement he flung a thin rope across the body and so manoeuvred it that in a minute or two he had fastened a stronger one to it, and the ghost of the lagoon answered to the tug of the boat which the fisherman began to pull for the smack.
The vessel hove to, and the adventurer having fastened his boat to the line flung out by the helmsman, scrambled aboard. The ghost floated in companionship with the vessel's boat, which dropped quietly astern. The Chioggia smack now hoisted her painted sails and steered for the channel by the Lido.
It was an ebb tide, and the water, as Mr. Symonds tells us in his " Italian Sketches " at such time, runs past the mulberry gardens of this pleasant hamlet like a river. The fishing boat, with its ghastly figure at the stern, swung into this rapid stream aided by a freshening breeze, and from the other side of the Riva no doubt looked a pretty object, as indeed it was if you took no note of its half- submerged cargo the dead passenger with its great white hands and its equally white face, like soft, half-tanned leather.
