Excerpt from The Lady of the Canaries Windows I beheld an ever-changing vision of ships, brown-sailed and oddly rigged, with gaily painted hulls; all day long there was a haunting savour of tarry ropes, and also, it must be admitted, an inter mittent ancient and fish -like smell; beyond the ships was the Giudecca, rose and pearl in the morn ing, tawny in the day, and a heaven of gold and brown at sunset; to the left I beheld the domes of the Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore, and to the right San Giorgio in Alga and the dusky mainland beyond Fusina. In addition to these de lights I soon had the pleasure (for abroad it is a pleasure, whatever it may be in England) of know ing most of my neighbours by sight. They were all picturesque, and the children were charming. My landlord was a retired gondolier, Zorzio Bresanin - a person who combined the most piratical aspect with a simple and cheerful soul. His wife, Marietta, came from Treviso - Treviso in Italy, she called it - and was exceedingly stout and a very good cook. Her one defect was a habit of singing out of tune all day long, but the words of her songs Were so naively amusing that I could easily forgive her. I was the only guest in the little pension; Marietta assured me thielt she had several English clients, all artists; but the autumn season had scarcely commenced, and the heat, in which I revel, and the mosquitoes, which I despise, had driven the majority of tourists to the sadly vulgarised Lido. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.