Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1883 — A Pretty Sight. [ARTICLE]

A Pretty Sight.

The piazza of St. Mark in Venice, a broad, open square, is the great resort of Venetians in the evening for conversation, ice-cream eating, coffee drinking and music. In the daytime it is the resort of myriads of pigeons which are fed at the expense of the state, and which have been held sacred ever since the aid rendered by one of them at the taking of Tyre, 700 years ago. They are very tame, and a lady traveler writing home says that one of the most beautiful sights she saw in Venice was a little girl of 3 years, daughter of an officer of the United States frigate Congress, seated pn the ground surrounded by pigeons. Her attendant had scattered corn all over her, the pigeons were struggling one over another on her lap, on her shoulders, piled up on her head, and out of this fluttering mass of soft plumage peeped the child’s sweet, half-surprised baby face.— Good Cheer. No street in the world, perhaps, possesses more value to the square foot than Fifth avenue, New York, the abode of so many millionaires.