the sounds of footsteps reached me. Extinguishing the match, I drew behind the door. The next moment Mr. Brown entered, holding a candle in one hand and with the other stanching a flesh wound on his cheek. I waited until he was fairly in the room, then making a rush, I—

I awoke. It was simply a case of Italian nightmare.

CHAPTER X.

CURIOUS CARS.-THE ITALIAN RAILROAD SYSTEM.-A FUNERAL IN VENICE.-HOW GLASS EYES ARE MADE.

THE country north-east of Bologna is dull and uninteresting. Nearer Venice it is not only disheartening, it is impassable. There are nothing but marshes, lagoons, and bogs. A tramp in that district is like a tramp in the Mississippi bottoms directly after an overflow. Therefore I repressed my pedestrian proclivities, invested $1.81 in a third-class ticket, and boarded the train for Venice.

When one buys a ticket at an Italian station there is a choice of three kinds-first, second, and third. The first entitles the holder to a seat in a car almost, though not quite, as luxurious as a Pullman; the second class entitles the holder to a seat as comfortable as the first class, but not as elegant or as fine, that is, the plush is not quite so new or so red. to-do travellers ride in the second class. fools," as the Italians say, ride in the first. patronized by peasants and the poorer classes generally, and occasionally-only occasionally-by an economical tourist.

Almost all well"Foreigners and The third class is

After buying your ticket you are allowed to enter the station and the train. As a rule you are not bothered or noticed again until at your destination, where your ticket has to be shown and given up before you can pass out through the gate. As no conductors go through the train, I wondered what there was to prevent one buying a third-class ticket and getting into a first-class car.

"If you dress well," said an Italian fellow-passenger, "no notice may be taken of your being in a first or second class car."

"But should a guard happen to ask to see your ticket, what then?"

"Oh, I tell you, I would rather sit on a board bench for a few hours, than possibly have to peck rock in a stone jail. for several months."

Pecking rock is not a pleasant pastime, and as the fraud in question is a penal offence, I no longer wonder that it is seldom attempted. Four out of five might pass undetected, but then as each thinks he will be the fifth, the absence of conductors is no security.

Some Italian cars are two stories high. The lower floor is divided into three sections, the two at the ends being second class, that in the middle first class. The upper floor, reached by a spiral staircase at the end of the car, is one large compartment used altogether by third-class passengers. The third class has harder seats than the other two, but the superior view makes up for that. The advocates of the European style of car claim that it secures exclusiveness. It is to be hoped the exclusiveness is satisfactory; there is nothing else to brag of. There are no water-coolers, no closets; you cannot stand up and stretch your cramped legs, or walk about when wearied with sitting. The passenger is locked up like so much freight, and shipped to his destination. Somewhere about half-way from Bologna I became tired of sitting still, and thought I would get out and stretch a little. By climbing half way out of the window, and nearly falling out and breaking my neck, I at length managed to reach the bolt and unfasten the door. Then I stepped out with a feeling of relief. In a very short minute I had to step back again, and this time with a feeling of any thing but relief, for the guard, who came running up, fairly hustled me in. He seemed outraged at what he called my "rashness."

"The train may start at any moment; you endanger your life in trying to jump on."

I meekly replied that I merely wanted a stretch and a drink of water.

"You can have the water, but you can't have the stretch," said the injured official. Then he whistled for the water-man. A glass of it was brought to my window, for which I paid one

cent.

The pedestrian can stretch and drink water ad libitum, but when he enters a town of only a thousand or two inhabitants he is waylaid at the gate and required to give a history of himself-whence he comes, how long he means to stop in the town, what is his age, his profession, what the profession of his father. These questions answered, the officer at the gate begins a personal examination. If you have a piece of cheese and bread, a bottle of wine, or other article of food, you are taxed from twenty to one hundred per cent. on the value of your luncheon. One day I was entering a town with a bottle of wine and a little bread and cheese. An officer stopped me and demanded seven cents tax.

"Tax for what?" I asked.

"On those provisions."

"But I do not mean to sell this luncheon. It is for my

"Oh, you can't help it, eh? Well, I'll help it." So going to a grassy plot near by, I ate my luncheon then and there. When, a few minutes later, I passed through the gate on the outside of the luncheon, instead of the luncheon on the outside of me, the officer grumbled and looked indignant at being "done" out of his seven cents.

As the train was entering Venice I noticed two peasant women stuffing chickens under their dresses. The scheme seemed likely to succeed. They had delivered their tickets up to the gate-man, and were passing on out of the depot when, in an evil moment, the half-smothered fowls set up a loud cackling. The poor peasant women were hauled back, and their hens confiscated, for attempting to smuggle.

Venice is one of the few places in Italy that fully comes up to one's previous ideas, which does not suffer from being seen

in reality instead of through poct's dreams. From the very nature of her surroundings change is impossible. In Rome whole streets have been, and are now being, levelled and widened and modernized. Even in Pompeii, which it would seem ought to retain undiminished all its ancient interest-even Pompeii loses much because of the nineteenth century modernisms that environ it. To hear the engines whistle and the cars rattle and the guards cry, "Pompeii-all out for Pompeii!" is necessarily disillusioning to the romantic tourist, who wishes in fancy to go back two thousand years and live in the past.

In Venice the streets of water cannot be straightened, cannot be widened, cannot be changed. The city cannot expand. As was Venice three hundred years ago, so she is to-day. The gondolas are as black, are as graceful as in ye olden time. The palaces with their steps leading down into the water arc as quaint and as curious. The people with their lazy, indolent habits are as proud now as I imagine were the ancient Venetians in the days of their city's greatest glory.

When I first read about Venice, as a school-boy, in school geographies, I had the idea that the only way to get about there was by the gondola. That is not so. The one hundred and seventeen islands upon which the city is built are islands by reason of the one hundred and forty-seven canals that wind in and around and about them. Along the sides of these canals you cannot walk; the houses and palaces are built to the water's edge, but in the rear of the houses are streets, the stran- →→→ › gest and most curious imaginable. Some of them are not above three feet wide, "fat men's misery "streets, as it were. Three hundred and ninety-eight bridges connect the little streets, and one who is good at threading labyrinthian ways may go all over Venice without looking at a gondola.

"If there is any place," I thought, "where I shall have to abandon cheap living, that place is Venice. Here I cannot tramp about in search of cheap lodging and eating places."

This was a mistake. Depositing my knapsack at the station, paying therefor a two-cent fee, I set out through the crooked