Co-teaching English Literature and English Language
Creating a Sense of Time and Place - Mark Twain

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging to the Grand
Hotel d’Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse than any thing else, though to speak
by the card, it was a gondola. And this was the storied gondola of Venice!--the fairy boat in
which the princely cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit
canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician beauties, while the gay
gondolier in silken doublet touched his guitar and sang as only gondoliers can sing! This
the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier!--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a
sable hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted
guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred from
public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned a corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch
between two long rows of towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing,
true to the traditions of his race.

I stood it a little while. Then I said:
“Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I’m a pilgrim, and I’m a stranger, but I am
not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such caterwauling as that. If that goes on,
one of us has got to take water. It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have
been blighted forever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this system
of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse, under protest, and you may fly
your flag of truce in peace, but here I register a dark and bloody oath that you shan’t sing.
Another yelp, and overboard you go.”

Here Mark Twain shows his disappointment in the gondola he and his friends hired. How does he show his disappointment?

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed forever. But I was too
hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow
moonlight the Venice of poetry and romance stood revealed. Right from the water’s edge
rose long lines of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and thither
and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys; ponderous stone
bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves. There was life and motion
everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was
suggestive of secret enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and
half in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to have an
expression about them of having an eye out for just such enterprises as these at that same
moment. Music came floating over the waters--Venice was complete.

In these lines, Mark Twain shows how his opinions of Venice changed. How does he show this?

It was a beautiful picture--very soft and dreamy and beautiful. But what was this Venice to
compare with the Venice of midnight? Nothing. There was a fete--a grand fete in honor of
some saint who had been instrumental in checking the cholera three hundred years ago,
and all Venice was abroad on the water. It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not
know how soon they might need the saint’s services again, now that the cholera was
spreading every where. So in one vast space--say a third of a mile wide and two miles
long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and every one of them had from two to ten,
twenty and even thirty colored lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen
occupants. Just as far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together--
like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms were never still;
they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling together, and seducing you into
bewildering attempts to follow their mazy evolutions. Here and there a strong red, green, or
blue glare from a rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the boats
around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and pyramids and circles of
colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the faces of the young and the sweet-scented and
lovely below, was a picture; and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so
numberless, so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture
likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party of young ladies
and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely decorated, and ate supper on board,
bringing their swallow-tailed, white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their
tables tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They had brought along the costly globe lamps
from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken curtains from the same places, I
suppose. And they had also brought pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas,
while the plebeian paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded around to stare and listen.

In these lines, Mark Twain suggests that his opinions of Venice changed yet again, at midnight. How does he help the reader appreciate his experience?

There was music every where--choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes, every thing. I
was so surrounded, walled in, with music, magnificence and loveliness, that I became
inspired with the spirit of the scene, and sang one tune myself. However, when I observed
that the other gondolas had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard,
I stopped.

How does Mark Twain bring this part of his recount to a conclusion?