Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1881 — In a Gondola. [ARTICLE]

In a Gondola.

Speaking of her experience in a gondola, a Venetian writer to the Detroit Free Press says: “Well, if I could have stopped breathing right there and then I would not have felt bad, tor I was too happy to feel badly over anything. Really, I never felt so happy in my life, not even when I first saw the Place de la Concorde in Paris, for I had seen palaces before, and the ground around them was no different than in dear old America; but to be riding in a gondola was so unlike anything I had ever done before, and so romantic, I cou|d with the greatest difficulty realize that I was myself. It was an awfully windy night, but our gondola rode beautifully over the waves with a very peculiar motion, caused by the queer way in which it was paddled along. As we turned in and out the streets of water the gondoliers would utter such strange and weird sounds, to let other gondoliers know we were going to turn the corner and they must take care not to have a collision. How the wind did whistle around the gondola and rattle* the windows, and how many corners we turned, and how many bridges we went under before we arrived at our hotel, which was an old palace! We had the gondola made fast at the foot of a flight of marble steps that came right down into the water, and ascending these steps into the hotel, went to our rooms and prepared for supper. It would not have taken much imagination to have fancied ourselves on an ocean steamer as the water made a terrible noise swashing up against the sides of the old palace.”