Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1875 — A Lagoon City. [ARTICLE]

A Lagoon City.

Charles Warren Stoddard writes to the San Francisco Chronicle: “ Palestrina, the last port between Venice and Chioggia, is a capital example of the lagoon city. At a little distance Palestrina looks like a coral reef rising high out of the water —if you can imagine such a state of nature. Presently you discover windows and doors in the white wall above the sea and tall chimneys—dozens of them—towering in groups above the roofs, that are mostly of an equal height. Palestrina is so narrow that its one row of houses is mirrored in the quiet sea on the lee side of it. There is a great wall just hack of the buildings that looks as if it might be a fortification for the defense of the people, but it isn’t. That wall is to keep the spray of the Adriatic from putting out the kitchen fires in Palestrina. Weather-beaten fishermen, hidden awaf under great shaggy coats with Esquimaux bonnets attached/ drifted up and down the quay of the city—its only street—and shaded their eyes with the hollow of their hands as we swung up to the one wharf of the town to exchange a halfdozen passengers, and then dropped oft in the stream again and headed for Chioggia, that swam in the distance like a town adrift. Palestrina, with a couple of hundred houses, dwindles down to a stone fort with a fishing-smack moored to it, and after that there is nothing visible but the sea-wall with a narrow path under it leading out to the cemetery at the point of the island.” . . r ; —They tell a good story in France, latterly, about the young Deputy who, being drawn into a duel ana called upon to fight with the pistol, was extreihely nervous, and repeatedly said to his second: “My adversary will hit me, I know he will. I feel it in my bones. “ Nonsense,” said the second. “ Your adversary never hit anything in his life. He couldn’t hit the side of a house nor a flock of gravestones.” The duel came off ana the young Deputy was hit, and pretty badly wounded, in the shoulder. While he was down on the grass, with the doctor binding up the wound, he said to the second, pettishly: “Aninaal! I told you he would hit me!” “ Oh, well!” said the second, coolly, “ that was because you stirred!” And the yoiing Deputy had to be contented with that as an explanation. —Fishing in the Tennessee River is pretty good just now. The other day a fisherman hauled up his wife, who had been missing for two weeks, and he saved the S2OO reward, he had offered for her rei co very,.