guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the murderess,
interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows of the Foscari,
the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of Falier,--which last they
know partly, however, because of the scandal about Falier's wife. Yet
after all, though the gondoliers are not the gondoliers of imaginative
literature, they have qualities which recommended them to my liking, and I
look back upon my acquaintance with two or three of them in a very
friendly spirit. Compared with the truculent hackmen, who prey upon the
traveling public in all other cities of the civilized world, they are
eminently intelligent and amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small
dishonesties are the breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or
water, everywhere; but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured
and simple that it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity
defeats their profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their
exposure half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future
employment purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one
troublesome experience with them, and that was in the case of the old
gondolier who taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his
services, plunged into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with
every mark of ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me
kindly when we met.

The immediate goal of every gondolier's ambition is to serve, no matter
for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all
foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he be
English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in a
gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your Tedesco
frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in a party of
six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the letter of the
tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law. The gondolier is