There was romance in every place.

But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.

Basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret.

Poor Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die! He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget.

He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre charmant" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre.