A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil | Page 5

quickly-cooled hot water procured by favour--and a gratuity--from a porter!
The Channel showed even more disagreeable than usual. A grey, cold sky, with swift-flying clouds from the east hung over a grey, cold sea, the waves showing their wicked white teeth under the lash of the strong wind. The patient lightship off the pier was swinging drearily as we throbbed past into the gust-swept open and set our bows for the unseen coast of France.
The tumult of passengers was speedily reduced to a limp and inert swarm of cold, wet, and sea-sick humanity.
The cold and miserable weather clung to us long. In Paris it snowed heavily, and I was constrained to betake myself in a cab--"chauff��," it is needless to remark--to seek out a kindly dentist, the bitter east wind having sought out and found a weak spot wherein to implant an abscess.
At Bale it was freezing, but clear and bright, and a good breakfast and a breath of clean, fresh air was truly enjoyable after the overheated sleeping-car in which we had come from Paris.
It may seem unreasonable to grumble at the overheating of the "Sleeper" after abusing the under-heating of our British railways. Surely, though, there is a golden mean? I wish neither to be frozen nor boiled, and there can be no doubt but that the heating of most Continental trains is excellent, the power of application being left to the traveller.
The journey by the St. Gotthard was delightful, the day brilliant, and the frost keen, while we watched the fleeting panorama of icebound peaks and snow-powdered pines from the cushions of our comfortable carriage.
The glory of winter left us as we left the Swiss mountains and dropped down into the fertile flats of Northern Italy, and at Milan all was raw chilliness and mud.
Nothing can well be more depressing than wet and cheerless weather in a land obviously intended for sunshine.
We slept at Milan, and the next day set forth in heavy rain towards Venice. The miserable ranks of distorted and pollarded trees stood sadly in pools of yellow-stained water, or stuck out of heaps of half-melted and uncleanly snow.
No colour; no life anywhere, excepting an occasional peasant plodding along a muddy road, sheltering himself under the characteristic flat and bony umbrella of the country.
At Peschiera we had promise of better things. The weather cleared somewhat, revealing ranges of white-clad hills around Garda.... But, alas! at Verona it rained as hard as ever, and we made our way from the railway station at Venice, cowering in the coffin-like cabin of a damp and extremely draughty gondola, while cold flurries of an Alpine-born wind swept across the Grand Canal.
Sunshine is absolutely necessary to bring out the real beauty of Italy. This is particularly the case in Venice, where light and life are required to dispel the feeling of sadness so sure to creep over one amid the signs of long-past grandeur and decaying magnificence.
On a grey and wintry day one is chiefly impressed by the dank chilliness of the palaces on the Grand Canal, whose feet lie lapped in slimy water; the lovely tracery of whose windows shows ragged and broken, whose stately guest-chambers are in the sordid occupation of the dealer in false antiques, and whose motto might be "Ichabod," for their glory has departed.
It is five-and-twenty years since I was last in Venice, and I can truly say that it has not improved in that long time. The loss of the great Campanile of St. Mark is not compensated for by the gain of the penny steamer which frets and fusses its prosaic way along the Grand Canal, or blurts its noisome smoke in the very face of the Palace of the Doges.
Well! A steady downpour is dispiriting at any time, excepting when one is snugly at home with plenty to do, and it is particularly so to the unlucky traveller who has to live through half-a-dozen long hours intervening between arrival at and departure from Venice on a cold, dull, wintry afternoon.
The sombre gondola writhed its sinuous course and deposited us all forlorn in the near neighbourhood of the Piazza San Marco. Splashing our way across, and pushing through the crowd of greedy fat pigeons, we entered the world-famous church. I know my Ruskin, and I feel that I should be lost in wonder and admiration--I am not.
The gloom--rich golden gloom if you will--of the interior oppresses me; it is cavernous. A service is being held in one of the transepts, and the congregation seems noisier and less devout than I could have believed possible. My thoughts fly far to where, on its solitary hill, the noble pile of Chartres soars majestic, its heaven-piercing spires dominating the wide plain of La Beauce. In fancy I enter by the splendid north door and find myself in