trundling the luggage along the platform. You
are off by the express. A guard has winked at
you. He feels that you want a locked-up coupé,
that you mean to smoke, and that he will have
half-a-crown. You are off for Paris. You are
off for Switzerland. You are off for the East.
Empty boxes! I have one, the bare sight of the
luggage-labels on which fills me with sorrow,
with remorse, with bitter shame. "Liverpool,"
"Manchester," "Boston," "Niagara,"
"Madrid," "Riga," "Cronstadt," "Wien,"
"Seville," "Frankfort," "Homburg,"
"Venezia," "Paris," "Maçon," " Milan"—it is a
Bradshaw cut up into strips and stuck
haphazard all over the lid and sides. I thank the
prudent porters who have striven to tear off
some of the labels. I am spared the
remembrance of some. This empty box has held my
gala clothes, my dearest books, my choicest
photographs, my rarest bits of bric-à-brac, and "the
soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcia." And what
has come of it all, beyond forty years, an
augmenting stomach, a damaged liver, and a confused
consciousness that one has made rather a mess
of it, and had better have stayed at home.

But we will endeavour to be cheerful, if you
please. Cheerful! How can, cheerfulness be
extracted from empty boxes: far less when
I am about to conduct you to the dullest and
gloomiest of all the boxes in the empty world.
Silent rows the songless gondolier, and sullen
plash his oar-blades on the waters of the back-
slum canal. I am going to see the
mournfullest sight in Venice. At the prow, crouches
the hotel guide. He, too, looks sad, although
he is in my service to-day; for I have told him
that to-morrow I shall have no need for his
services. I have "done" all the lions of Venice
twice over; and Venice is in a state of siege,
and I am the only tourist in the desolate city;
and my guide has been half starving for weeks,
and will wholly starve, I fear, when he has spent
the last two florins I purpose to bestow upon
him. For charity begins at home; and few
travellers care to grant weekly pensions to hotel
guides out of work, who are always bores, and
often rascals. The oars continue dully to plash;
and the gondolier—who has not had a fare for
a week—only breaks the sickening silence by his
lugubrious cry of warning when he turns a
comer. There was a time when I went a
gondoliering with the pleasantest of poodles at the
prow; but darker and darker days have set in
for Venice; and things have gone from bad to
worse, and the city has faded into a cemetery.
Whither are we bound? To the magnificent
palace which has been turned into the
governmental pawn-shop, and through whose windows,
now close barred, but whose balconies were once
hung with rich tapestries, and over whose sills
fair ladies smiled, mountains of unredeemed
pledges in ghostly bundles palely loom? Not
thither. To the deserted halls of the great
Pesaro Palace, now converted into an old
curiosity-shop, rented by a Jew from Geneva?
Not thither. To the empty arsenal, with its
shipless basins, and ropeless rope-walks—the
arsenal where Dante once saw the pitch and tar
boiling in huge caldrons that reminded him of
the Stygian Lake? No; not thither. Nor to the
island of Murano, where the huge mirrors and
crystal chandeliers of Venice were once made,
but where now there is only a paltry manufactory
of toy-beads. Nor to picture-gallery, nor
church, nor cabinet of mosaics. We are only on
our way to see some empty boxes.

A dreadful beggar-man, by his father's side a
leper, by his mother's a hunchback, and himself
an idiot; a creature whose rags are so intimate
with his flesh that the tatters might be strips of
unwashed epidermis—this specimen of the
Republic in Ruins, with a long hook draws our
gondola to the landing-place, holds out his
ragged arm to help me to shore, cringing low as
he begs an obolus for the sake of the Madonna,
and is grateful for the farthing which I give him.
(For, as all day long, the beggars of Venice buzz
about you, and you are bound to relieve, say one
in ten, you will find that a soldo, or farthing,
at a time will make, before midnight, a considerable
vacuum in your pocket.) We mount some
slimy steps, and pass under a colonnade, whose
stones are damp and green, and recal those of a
dead-house by the water-side. Between each
pair of columns hangs a huge lamp, some faded
gilding clinging to its ironwork, and its top
crowned with the battered effigy of a Phœnix.
"Those lamps," whispers the guide, "have not
been lighted for seven years." We stand before
an old wooden door, the knocker and the keyhole
red with rust, the huge-headed nails which once
studded it half gone, the holes left black and
meaningless, like the sockets of dead eyes. Paint
it must have had, this door, in the bygone; but
mildew has picked the pigment away, and streaks
and smears of oozy moisture laugh grimly at what
the painter's brush may have effected years ago.
This was once a stage door. Hither the pets of
the ballet came tripping to rehearsal, with
wreaths of artificial flowers in their reticules,
and practising shoes under their arms. Here,
the servitors of the Venetian nobility left
perfumed billets. Here, the great prima donna,
Assoluta di Cartello, landed from her own
splendid gondola, and, perhaps, condescended
to be assisted to shore by the primo tenore.
Where once her stately feet trod, is only now the
brackish sea-slime. We knock at the door, and,
after a while, a Judas wicket opens, and through
the grating peers a wrinkled old parchment face,
with a few white bristles on the chin, which
Balthazar Denner might have painted. A piping
voice inquires our will. I answer, that I wish to
see the empty boxes, and I softly slap some loose
florins in my pocket. The Judas trap closes;
but, anon, the door itself is opened, and a little
old man, who might have been a junior clerk in
an office close to the Rialto, when Shylock did
business there—who, as a specimen of Venice
Preserved—seemingly in a solution of garlic—is
highly respectable, no doubt, but who is assuredly
the nastiest old man I have set eyes upon during