The Argosy — page 122: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

107 THE PERPLEXITIES OF CAPTAIN FIERAMOSCA. By Joyce DARRELL. I, } PRBILESS you, reader, like everybody else in these travelling days, have been to Venice. You have seen the great sights, properly admired the sunsets from the Lido, dreamed away delicious hours in a gondola, fed the pigeons and waited for the bronze Moors to strike the hours. And, inspired by the later prophets, you have explored the narrow calli in search of Byzantine fragments. You have dawdled on the little bridges, or by the steps where the fruit-barges unload, and you have watched the myriad sparkles of the lovely green water caress- ingly creep up the mournful walls of the houses. All this you have done, and more; but perhaps you have never just chanced to stray into the Campiello Nuovo. When it came by its name it were hard to say, for there is nothing new about it. Once, as an inscription on the wall records, it was a cemetery, and ceased to be one at a comparatively recent date. Something of the mild and melancholy grace of its former office clings to it still, and, for all its woeful shabbiness, renders it instinct with a pathetic and pictur- esque charm. On one side (the most prosperous and least attractive) rises a white house with red brick mouldings, behind which the acacias of a pleasant garden are just visible above the high stone wall. Opposite is a jumble of irregular buildings, whose mildewed walls and gaping crevices the weeds soften here and there with feathery tufts of green. Most of the shutters are closed ; those which are open hang often but by one rusty hinge. From one house projects a little wooden terrace partly overhung with creepers and crowded with flower pots, and supported on small twisted marble columns. All about, up and down, with no order in their placing, are tiny windows opening obviously into lowly rooms. In front of another line of dwellings runs a low wall, and in the midst of this is a small, mysterious-looking green door which might be the entrance to the house of Bluebeard. | A water-carrier with her bronze pails slung from her shoulder rings at this: the little door opens noiselessly, pulled back by unseen hands ; a glimpse is given of a narrow paved court set about with flower-pots, and then the water-carrier (bearer perhaps of a secret note to Fatima) disappears with a splash and a jingle, and a greeting in her soft Venetian to some hidden friend within. GOnlGaooks (C©)