Guides, professional and amateur, bring in little groups of travellers, and one hears their monotonous informative voices above the foot-falls; for, as in all cathedrals, the prevailing sound is of boots.

In S.Mark's the boots make more noise than in most of the others because of the unevenness of the pavement, which here and there lures to the trot.

One day as I sat in my favourite seat, high up in the gallery, by a mosaic of S.Liberale, a great gathering of French pilgrims entered, and, seating themselves in the right transept beneath me, they disposed themselves to listen to an address by the French priest who shepherded them.

His nasal eloquence still rings in my ears.
A little while after I chanced to be at Padua, and there, in the church of S.Anthony, I found him again, again intoning rhetoric.
S.Mark's is never empty, but when the rain falls--and in Venice rain literally does fall--it is full.

Then do the great leaden spouts over the facade pour out their floods, while those in the courtyard of the Doges' Palace expel an even fiercer torrent.