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A VENETIAN ARSENAL 257 shewed us little but slopes covered with vegetation. By-and-by, however, in one of these slopes we came to an aperture like the burrow of a Titanic rabbit. As we entered it I saw that it was vaulted with beauti-fully cut stone-work. We advanced a few paces ; then the burrow widened, and we found ourselves in a crypt of broad, curving galleries. They were sufficiently lighted from a small court or well, and the windows showed us the enormous thickness of the masonry. They showed us also the perfection and the wonderful preservation of it. Here and there, in a corner where once must have stood a furnace, the low, incumbent arches were still stained with smoke, but everywhere else the stone-work was so raw in its freshness that one felt inclined to look for the masons' tools at the foot of it. Departing by a passage like that by which we had entered, I saw that the whole was contained in a thickening or excres-cence of the ramparts. We reached the world out-side through a bed of untrodden weeds. Captain Scott, having heard what I had seen in the morning, had promised to show me such other objects as would, he thought, be most likely to interest me. He now therefore took me to a house— or rather to a shed—where some fragments of armour, found amongst the ruins, had been collected. They were too much broken, however, to be of interest to anyone but an expert. So far as my eye could tell me they might have been pieces of rusty biscuit-tins. We were now in the inhabited quarter, S

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