There are plenty of Jews left in Venice; in fact, I have been told that they are gradually getting possession of the city, and judging by their ability in that direction elsewhere, I can readily believe it; but I saw none in the least like the Shylock of the English stage, although I spent some time both in the New Ghetto and the Old by the Cannaregio.
All unwilling I once had the company of a small Jewish boy in a gaberdine for the whole way from the New Ghetto to the steamboat station of S.Toma, his object in life being to acquire for nothing a coin similar to one which I had given to another boy who had been really useful.

If he avowed once that he was a starving Jewish boy and I was a millionaire, he said it fifty times.

Every now and then he paused for an anxious second to throw a somersault.

But I was obdurate, and embarking on the steamer, left the two falsehoods to fight it out.
The two Ghettos, by the way, are not interesting; no traveller, missing them, need feel that he has been in Venice in vain.
At the other end of the Rialto campo, opposite the church, is the famous hunchback, the Gobbo of the Rialto, who supports a rostrum from which the laws of the Republic were read to the people, after they had been read, for a wider audience, from the porphyry block at the corner of S.
Mark's.
Leaving the Gobbo on our left and passing from the campo at the right-hand corner, we come to the great arcaded markets for fruit and vegetables, and further to the wholesale and retail fish markets, all of which are amusing to loiter in, particularly in the early hours of the morning.

To the Erberia are all the fruit-laden barges bound, chiefly from Malamocco, the short cut from the lagoon being through the Rio del Palazzo beneath the Bridge of Sighs and into the Grand Canal, just opposite us, by the Post Office.