The fruit market is busy twice a day, in the early morning and in the late afternoon; the fish market in the morning only.
[Illustration: S.MARIA GLORIOSA DEI FRARI] The vegetables and fruit differ according to the seasons; the fish are always the same.

In the autumn, when the quay is piled high with golden melons and flaming tomatoes, the sight is perhaps the most splendid.
The strangest of the fish to English eyes are the great cuttle-fish, which are sold in long slices.

It strikes one as a refinement of symmetrical irony that the ink which exudes from these fish and stains everything around should be used for indicating what their price is.
Here also are great joints of tunny, huge red scarpenna, sturgeon, mullet, live whole eels (to prove to me how living they were, a fishmonger one morning allowed one to bite him) and eels in writhing sections, aragosta, or langouste, and all the little Adriatic and lagoon fish--the scampi and shrimps and calimari--spread out in little wet heaps on the leaves of the plane-tree.

One sees them here lying dead; one can see them also, alive and swimming about, in the aquarium on the Lido, where the prettiest creatures are the little cavalli marini, or sea horses, roosting in the tiny submarine branches.
From all the restlessness and turmoil of these markets there is escape in the church of S.Giovanni Elemosinario, a few yards along the Ruga Vecchia di San Giovanni on the left.

Here one may sit and rest and collect one's thoughts and then look at a fine rich altar-piece by Pordenone--S.