cholera was spreading every where. So in one vast space--say a third of

a mile wide and two miles long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and

every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored

lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants. Just as

far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together

--like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms

were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling

together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy

evolutions. Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a

rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the

boats around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and

pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the

faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture;

and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless,

so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture

likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party

of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely

decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed,

white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables

tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They had brought along the

costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken

curtains from the same places, I suppose. And they had also brought

pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian

paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded

around to stare and listen.

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The Innocents Abroad