"...we set forth that dull cold afternoon on the top of a high tide and a flowing sea, from the Club, up Canal Grande past La Salute, turning off at the Duchess of Madrid's red and yellow posted palace with the gilded Florentine lilies, to go up Rio di San Vio. And then, just after you pass the Erastian temple, the Rio di San Vio narrows, and is crossed by a bridge, before it widens again into a very decent canal with quays for pedestrians on both sides of it. We had swirled through the narrow part and under the bridge, when the calamity occurred. I was rowing at the prow, and Emily was steering at the poop, the pace being my usual swift and hectic one. A big unwieldy barea of firewood came suddenly towards us, rowed by two of my former gondoglieri, Piero Venerand and Ermengildo Vianel, who had gotten a better winter job than mine in the firewood business of the latter's father. To avoid collision Emily precipitately twitched my barchets to one side without much judgement. I incontinently lost my balance; and, disliking the notion of crashing ignominiously inboard to sprawl among the oars and forcole, I made no ado whatever, but just gripped my short pipe more tightly between my teeth, and took a neat header into the canal, passing right under the approaching wood barge.
As I shot through the air I saw all the hands of all the people on the two fondamente being flung to heaven, and I heard all their voices bawling, 'Ara, Ara! O Mariavergine! For pleasure here is an English going to drown himself fastidiously!' So as soon as I got under water, I told myself that the said English had better give these people something truly rare and wholesome to cough about. Wherefore I swam, submerged, about thirty yards up the Rio, passionlessly emerging (to a fanfare of yells) in a totally unexpected place, with a perfectly stony face, and the short pipe still stiff and rigid in an immovable mouth."
