"Well, I don't know," returned the editor. "After all, we eat a good deal

of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people. Even when

we drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, "If we can't get

ice-water in Europe, I don't know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the talk

threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and

European customs.

Burnamy could not bear to let it. "I don't pretend to be very well up in

French literature," he began, "but I think such a book as 'The Maiden

Knight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty

well-built story when they like it. Of course it's sentimental, and it

begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in

character, and it makes the reader imagine it too. The man who wrote that

book may be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half.

By-and-by he'll do something--after he's come to see that his 'Maiden

Knight' was a fool--that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr. March,

if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book."

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to

March in the end, he deferred with authority still. March liked him for

coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned

to like yet. "Yes," he said, "if he has the power you say, and can keep

it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!"

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose

Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother

viewed his rapture with tender amusement. The steward was at Kenby's

shoulder with the salad and his entreating "Bleace!" and Triscoe seemed

to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy's general

disagreement. He said at last: "I'm afraid we haven't the documents. You

don't seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven't read 'The

Maiden Knight'." He added to March: "But I don't defend absinthe.

Ice-water is better. What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both

for raw whiskey--and for milk-and-water."

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next. "The

doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth

Wednesday morning. I always like to get a professional opinion on the

ship's run."

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the

journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her

children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table

in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.

"We had quite a literary dinner," she remarked, hovering for a moment

near the chair which she later sank into. "It must have made you feel

very much at home. Or perhaps you're so tired of it at home that you

don't talk about books."

"We always talk shop, in some form or other," said Mrs. March. "My

husband never tires of it. A good many of the contributors come to us,

you know."

"It must be delightful," said the girl. She added as if she ought to

excuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers if

she had chosen, "I'm sorry one sees so little of the artistic and

literary set. But New York is such a big place."

"New York people seem to be very fond of it," said Mrs. March. "Those who

have always lived there."

"We haven't always lived there," said the girl. "But I think one has a

good time there--the best time a girl can have. It's all very well coming

over for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere. Are you going

out for a long time?"

"Only for the summer. First to Carlsbad."

"Oh, yes. I suppose we shall travel about through Germany, and then go to

Paris. We always do; my father is very fond of it."

"You must know it very well," said Mrs. March, aimlessly.

"I was born there,--if that means knowing it. I lived there--till I was

eleven years old. We came home after my mother died."

"Oh!" said Mrs. March.

The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of those

leaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrived

at asking, "Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?"

Mrs. March laughed. "He is going to be, as soon as his poem is printed."

"Poem?"

"Yes. Mr. March thinks it's very good."

"I thought he spoke very nicely about 'The Maiden Knight'. And he has

been very nice to papa. You know they have the same room."

"I think Mr. Burnamy told me," Mrs. March said.

The girl went on. "He had the lower berth, and he gave it up to papa;

he's done everything but turn himself out of doors."

"I'm sure he's been very glad," Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy's behalf,

but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences they

should shrink and wither away.

"I always tell papa that there's no country like America for real

unselfishness; and if they're all like that, in Chicago!" The girl

stopped, and added with a laugh, "But I'm always quarrelling with papa

about America."

"We have a daughter living in Chicago," said Mrs. March, alluringly.

But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all she

meant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs.

March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy. She gave another of

her leaps. "I don't see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe,

at home. They say that there was a time when there were no chaperons

before hoops, you know." She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting

one slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, as

if she were getting ready to rise at any moment. "When they used to sit

on their steps."

"It was very pleasant before hoops--in every way," said Mrs. March. "I

was young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was always

simpler than in New York. I used to sit on our steps. It was delightful

for girls--the freedom."

"I wish I had lived before hoops," said Miss Triscoe.

"Well, there must be places where it's before hoops yet: Seattle, and

Portland, Oregon, for all I know," Mrs. March suggested. "And there must

be people in that epoch everywhere."

"Like that young lady who twists and turns?" said Miss Triscoe, giving

first one side of her face and then the other. "They have a good time. I

suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another. If it

came in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come in

chaperons. You'll think I'm a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimes

I wish there was more America instead of less. I don't believe it's as

bad as people say. Does Mr. March," she asked, taking hold of the chair

with one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, while

she gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, "does he

think that America is going--all wrong?"

"All wrong? How?"

"Oh, in politics, don't you know. And government, and all that. And

bribing. And the lower classes having everything their own way. And the

horrid newspapers. And everything getting so expensive; and no regard for

family, or anything of that kind."

Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered,

still cautiously, "I don't believe he does always. Though there are times

when he is very much disgusted. Then he says that he is getting too

old--and we always quarrel about that--to see things as they really are.

He says that if the world had been going the way that people over fifty

have always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in the time

of the anthropoidal apes."

"Oh, yes: Darwin," said Miss Triscoe, vaguely. "Well, I'm glad he doesn't

give it up. I didn't know but I was holding out just because I had argued

so much, and was doing it out of--opposition. Goodnight!" She called her

salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched her gliding

out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of the

ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and wondered if

Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were a young man

she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.

The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer

chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his many

bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came

toward her from the opposite direction. She nodded brightly to him, and

he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.

"Here is your chair!" Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out of

the chair next her own. "Mr. March is wandering about the ship

somewhere."

"I'll keep it for him," said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take

the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his

hand with an "Oh; thank you," which seemed also a permission for him to

wrap it about her in the chair.

He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the

promenade. The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the

music-room, as she had done the day before. At first she revolved there

as if she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner;

then she moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously

alone. Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs.

March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too. She

waited for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept

chatting on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away.

Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him. Then

she heard him saying, "Would you like a turn or two?" and Miss Triscoe

answering, "Why, yes, thank you," and promptly getting out of her chair

as if the pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all

nothing.

She had the composure to say, "You can leave your shawl with me, Miss

Triscoe," and to receive her fervent, "Oh, thank you," before they sailed

off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of the

music-room. Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from which

she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when he

happened along.

He chose to be perverse about her romance. "Well, now, you had better let

them alone. Remember Kendricks." He meant one of their young friends

whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left them in

lasting doubt of what they had done. "My sympathies are all with the

pivotal girl. Hadn't she as much right to him, for the time being, or for

good and all, as Miss Triscoe?"

"That depends upon what you think of Burnamy."

"Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from her

just when she's made sure of him. How do you suppose she is feeling now?"

"She isn't feeling at all. She's letting her revolving light fall upon

half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or consecutively.

All that she wants to make sure of is that they're young men--or old

ones, even."

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said. "I've been

having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room."

"You smell like it," said his wife, not to seem too eager: "Well?"

"Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout. He doesn't think things are

going as they should in America. He hasn't been consulted, or if he has,

his opinion hasn't been acted upon."

"I think he's horrid," said Mrs. March. "Who are they?"

"I couldn't make out, and I couldn't ask. But I'll tell you what I

think."

"What?"

"That there's no chance for, Burnamy. He's taking his daughter out to

marry her to a crowned head."

XV.

It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade.

Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three

or four deep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of

the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were

wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps.

The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and

was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to go

wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March's

wing.

Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing in

the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained

talking and laughing till the music began again.

"Don't you want to try it?" he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.

"Isn't it rather--public?" she asked back.

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm

thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.

"Perhaps it is rather obvious," he said, and he made a long glide over

the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man

who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment her

hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each

other within the circle.

"How well she dances!" said Miss Triscoe.

"Do you think so? She looks as if she had been wound up and set going."

"She's very graceful," the girl persisted.

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine

charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of

passengers on all steamers. There were recitations in English and German,

and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever more

piano performance. Most of those who took part were of the race gifted in

art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its fathers

counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme, with an

audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned

by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment. She

hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening

ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the

saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who

take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some

unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.

The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the

pretty harbor of Plymouth. In the cool early light the town lay distinct

along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with

come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat

of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another

the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines

of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls

dividing the green fields. The very iron-clads in the harbor close at

hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue

English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the

sunrise had not quite faded. The breath of the land came freshly out over

the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls wheeled

and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices on the

tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the ship's

side. A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage they

formed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out for the

shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they left

clustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. and Mrs. Leffers bade

March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee with

them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly

filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated;

these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed

at others. The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohio

friend and his wife. He tried to engage them in the tally which began to

be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held

aloof.

Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the

usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among

those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent

is apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some meagre New York

stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print

announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a

coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.

"I always have to get used to it over again," said Kenby. "This is the

twentieth time I have been across, and I'm just as much astonished as I

was the first, to find out that they don't want to know anything about us

here."

"Oh," said March, "curiosity and the weather both come from the west. San

Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago about

New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels the

other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave."

"Ah, but London doesn't care a rap about Vienna," said Kenby.

"Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own

side. It isn't an infallible analogy."

Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the

discussion. He gulped it, and broke out. "Why should they care about us,

anyway?"

March lightly ventured, "Oh, men and brothers, you know."

"That isn't sufficient ground. The Chinese are men and brothers; so are

the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're not

impatient for the latest news about them. It's civilization that

interests civilization."

"I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?"

Burnamy put in, with a smile.

"Do you think we are civilized?" retorted the other.

"We have that superstition in Chicago," said Burnamy. He added, still

smiling, "About the New-Yorkers, I mean."

"You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed. New York is an

anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees."

"Oh, I don't think you can say that," Kenby cheerfully protested, "since

the Reformers came in. Look at our streets!"

"Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them

we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals. But how

long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?"

"Oh, never in the world!" said the optimistic head of the table.

"I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one of

the things that help to establish Tammanys with us. You will see our

Tammany in power after the next election." Kenby laughed in a

large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other's

flame. "New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it's

morally a frontier mining-town. Socially it's--" He stopped as if he

could not say what.

"I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa," said his

daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about

it.

Her father went on as if he had not heard her. "It's as vulgar and crude

as money can make it. Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there's

enough, it counts for everything. In less than a year you'll have Tammany

in power; it won't be more than a year till you'll have it in society."

"Oh no! Oh no!" came from Kenby. He did not care much for society, but he

vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the

amenities.

"Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?" asked March in the

pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh.

"There's no reason why it shouldn't be. Society is as bad as all the rest

of it. And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially, the

whole country wishes to be and tries to be."

There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could

find just the terms of refutation.

"Well," said Kenby at last, "it's a good thing there are so many lines to

Europe. We've still got the right to emigrate."

"Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers

for exercising a man's right to live where he chooses. And there is no

country in Europe--except Turkey, or Spain--that isn't a better home for

an honest man than the United States."

The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to

speak. Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe's eye, and

said, slowly and distinctly: "I don't know just what reason you have to

feel as you do about the country. I feel differently about it

myself--perhaps because I fought for it."

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an

answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubted

its validity.

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a

violent impulse upon it. He said, coldly, "I was speaking from that

stand-point."

The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though

he had put himself in the wrong. His old hand trembled beside his plate,

and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife

was sharing his pain and shame.

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at

Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in

Cuxhaven. Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line

before, and asked several questions. Her father did not speak again, and

after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move

from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Eltwin rose at

the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke another

defeat, in some way.

Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, "I

think I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon."

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as

distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose

daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside

to let the two men come together.

"That is all right, Colonel--"

"Major," Eltwin conscientiously interposed.

"Major," Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand

which had been tremulously rising toward him. "There can't be any doubt

of what we did, no matter what we've got."

"No, no!" said the other, eagerly. "That was what I meant, sir. I don't

think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the country

has a right to think what he pleases about it."

Triscoe said, "That is all right, my dear sir. May I ask your regiment?"

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife

of the one and the daughter of the other. They saw the young girl making

some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.

"That was rather fine, my dear," said Mrs. March.

"Well, I don't know. It was a little too dramatic, wasn't it? It wasn't

what I should have expected of real life."

"Oh, you spoil everything! If that's the spirit you're going through

Europe in!"

"It isn't. As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform."

XVI.

That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his

opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom

able to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his belief

in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he had

left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of

a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union. Some millions of

other men had gone into the war from the varied motives which impelled

men at that time; but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man of

property and a man of family, in doing so. His family had improved as

time passed, and it was now so old that back of his grandfather it was

lost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired from the sea and become a

merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his son established

himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-trader

whose social position was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked to

mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to realize

just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery was; it heightened

the effect of his pose.

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted

Brigadier-General at the close. With this honor, and with the wound which

caused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a

rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was

not long in going to pieces in his hands. Then the young couple went to

live in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died

when the child was ten years old. A little later his father-in-law died,

and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his

daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a

right to expect.

The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back

to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the

Republic as they had been under the Second Empire. He was still willing

to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be

used on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his provision-man was

sent to Congress instead. Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted

to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being

attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured

no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came

back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left

school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre

parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring

through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had no duties,

but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd

tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books

were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had

romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian. Her character

was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father

might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for

the summer.

The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased

to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve

his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at

Berne. Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere,

but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the

mission he had expected, decided to go without it. He was really very fit

for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deserve

public place by public service, he had deserved it. His pessimism was

uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might well

have reached the bottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents

suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children. She did not

think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not

have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and

went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father. She

said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of

place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed

to have everything there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs.

Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one of

the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the

Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where

the Norumbia was to land again. The young people talked across Mrs. March

to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their

gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like

airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all the nicer not to know

just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he

suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of

the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with

Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea. There had

been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come

aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they

shrank from forming others. Then the charm of the idle, eventless life

grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable

end.

Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration

were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles. Burnamy and Miss

Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated

to have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at sea

again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkation

by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the

hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that

passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water. At

Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different

in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control

of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French

fortifications much more on show than the English had been. Nothing

marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined

them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great

battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. The elder couple

tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated the

spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and,

leave the young people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl,

whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her

waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the

young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship. Burnamy was

not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving

him finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing the

whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact. Burnamy spent a

great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an

intolerable resignation to the girl's absence.

"Yes," said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, "that terrible

patience of youth!"

"Patience? Folly! Stupidity! They ought to be together every instant! Do

they suppose that life is full of such chances? Do they think that fate

has nothing to do but--"

She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, "Hang round and wait on

them?"

"Yes! It's their one chance in a life-time, probably."

"Then you've quite decided that they're in love?" He sank comfortably

back, and put up his weary legs on the chair's extension with the

conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.

"I've decided that they're intensely interested in each other."

"Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do or

don't do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it's

that? Is marriage such a very certain good?"

"It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is. What would

our lives have been without it?" she retorted.

"Oh, we should have got on. It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought to

go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a

nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don't mind

their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. I

doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he

hadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a young

lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her little

charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other

things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow

like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to

climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You wouldn't

want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had money,

and I doubt if she has much. It's all very pretty to have a girl like her

fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn't

altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in the

very world she belongs to. I don't think it's for us to promote the

affair."

"Well, perhaps you're right," she sighed. "I will let them alone from

this out. Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very long."

"Oh, I don't think there's any harm done yet," said her husband, with a

laugh.

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she

suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through

the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table

first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;

she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their

chairs on deck.

There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but

the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after

they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to

their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a

remorseful pang. "Well," she said, "I wish we were going to be in New York

to-morrow, instead of Hamburg."

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" he protested. "Not so bad as that, my dear. This is the

last night, and it's hard to manage, as the last night always is. I

suppose the last night on earth--"

"Basil!" she implored.

"Well, I won't, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I've

never seen a Dutch lugger, and--"

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was

silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking

as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by. They

were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up

into his face while he talked.

"Now," Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, "let us

go instantly. I wouldn't for worlds have them see us here when they get

found again. They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that

would spoil everything. Come!"

XVII.

Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss

Triscoe's prompting. He had not to wait long.

"And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?"

"Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public."

"How could you tell that they were-taking?"

"They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them."

"And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?"

"I don't believe it was. The theory in the office was that he didn't

think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things

into shape."

"What things?"

"Oh--ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics. He

owns shares in everything but the United States Senate--gas, electricity,

railroads, aldermen, newspapers--and now he would like some Senate.

That's what I think."

She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this

cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercest

accusals of the country. "How fascinating it is!" she said, innocently.

"And I suppose they all envy your coming out?"

"In the office?"

"Yes. I should envy, them--staying."

Burnamy laughed. "I don't believe they envy me. It won't be all roses for

me--they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if it

isn't." He remembered something one of his friends in the office had said

of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried his

beak on him in the belief that he was soft.

She abruptly left the mere personal question. "And which would you rather

write: poems or those kind of sketches?"

"I don't know," said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms. "I

suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there are

things you can't say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse in

college; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March took

this little piece for 'Every Other Week'."

"Little? I thought it was a long poem!"

Burnamy laughed at the notion. "It's only eight lines."

"Oh!" said the girl. "What is it about?"

He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in

a person of his make. "I can repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs.

March."

"Oh, no indeed!" He said the lines over to her very simply and well.

"They are beautiful--beautiful!"

"Do you think so?" he gasped, in his joy at her praise.

"Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man--the only

literary man--I ever talked with. They must go out--somewhere! Papa must

meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I'm making the most of

you."

"You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe," said Burnamy.

She would not mind his mocking. "That day you spoke about 'The Maiden

Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that

way. I didn't know you were an author then."

"Well, I'm not much of an author now," he said, cynically, to retrieve

his folly in repeating his poem to her.

"Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks."

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other

Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously

neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs.

March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know

just how much she thought of him as a writer? "Did she like the poem."

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the

poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's

liking for Burnamy. "But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!" This

was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his

personal history. "And you didn't know any one when, you went up to

Chicago from--"

"Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in the

office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to

let me try my hand. That was all I could ask."

"Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A

woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!" sighed the girl.

"But women do!" Burnamy retorted. "There is a girl writing on the paper

now--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came to

Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made

her way single-handed from interviewing up."

"Oh," said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. "Is she

nice?"

"She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of

journalism that women do isn't the most dignified. And she's one of the

best girls I know, with lots of sense."

"It must be very interesting," said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in

the way she said it. "I suppose you're quite a little community by

yourselves."

"On the paper?"

"Yes."

"Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't.

There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you'd like to come

out," Burnamy ventured, "perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do."

"What's that?"

"Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for

dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette."

He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, "Do women

write it?"

He laughed reminiscently. "Well, not always. We had one man who used to

do it beautifully--when he was sober. The department hasn't had any

permanent head since."

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no

doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. "Do

you know what time we really get in to-morrow?"

"About one, I believe--there's a consensus of stewards to that effect,

anyway." After a pause he asked, "Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?"

"We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to

Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet."

"Are you going direct to Dresden?"

"I don't know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two."

"I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that will

get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let me

be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow."

"You're very kind. You've been very good already--to papa." He protested

that he had not been at all good. "But he's used to taking care of

himself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!"

"So it is! How strange that seems! It's actually Europe. But as long as

we're at sea, we can't realize it. Don't you hate to have experiences

slip through your fingers?"

"I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're

always other people's."

This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.

He only suggested, "Well; sometimes they make other people have the

experiences."

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left

the question. "Do you understand German?"

"A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of

beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things."

"I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany, I

hear."

"Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will

you?"

She did not answer. "It must be rather late, isn't it?" she asked. He let

her see his watch, and she said, "Yes, it's very late," and led the way

within. "I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and I

must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left

home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!"

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered

whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of

novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the

first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss

Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.

XVIII.

The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and

disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the

shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went

and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no

longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a

moment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below

had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered

with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the

bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the

corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people

who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give,

anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give

the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby

brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head

steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering

him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an

officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music,

which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on

the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer

cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle

much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been

for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied

themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where

the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their

hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that

people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge

them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer

of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every

one sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were all on the

tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with

the hand-baggage. "Is this Hoboken?" March murmured in his wife's ear,

with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed

action of the kinematograph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the

companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded

together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing

rain. Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss

Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from

Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom

he was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was talking

with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding

sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.

Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and

after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh

count that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble;

their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes

expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have

been very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room at

the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee

with unexpected cordiality.

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the

customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they

were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the

restaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors--the

shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German

voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars.

Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a

letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, "Krahnay,

Krahnay!" When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and

shouted, "Crane! Crane!" and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry,

"Kren! Kren!" But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.

People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending

home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear

cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal of

talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls

behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served

them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though

voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the

travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual

with these amiable people.

Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife,

and leaned over her son to ask, "Do you know what lese-majesty is? Rose

is afraid I've committed it!"

"No, I don't," said March. "But it's the unpardonable sin. What have you

been doing?"

"I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he

said at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the railroads

belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table,

it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's lese-majesty." She

gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's face with an

appealing smile.

"Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I

hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March. She's been complaining of the

coffee."

"Indeed I shall say what I like," said Mrs. March. "I'm an American."

"Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anything

disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's railroad

station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your

account."

Mrs. Adding asked: "Then they won't punish ladies? There, Rose! I'm safe,

you see; and you're still a minor, though you are so wise for your

years."

She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.

"I don't know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,",

said Mrs. March. "And you've joined with her in her joking. Go and speak,

to him!"

The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. March

overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his

shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face. March tried

to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: "Oh, yes. I

understood that. But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother to

take any risks."

"I don't believe she will, really, Rose. But I'll speak to her, and tell

her she can't be too cautious."

"Not now, please!" the boy entreated.

"Well, I'll find another chance," March assented. He looked round and

caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the

Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her

father appeared not to see March. "It's all right, with Rose," he said,

when he sat down again by his wife; "but I guess it's all over with

Burnamy," and he told her what he had seen. "Do you think it came to any

displeasure between them last night? Do you suppose he offered himself,

and she--"

"What nonsense!" said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace. "It's her

father who's keeping her away from him."

"I shouldn't mind that. He's keeping her away from us, too." But at that

moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came

over to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to Dresden that

evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other

on the train or in Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with

her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.

"They're Goths," he said of the Germans. "I could hardly get that stupid

brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch."

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether

surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow asked if he

could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the

train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe he

did not seem in a hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, "Yes, you can

see that as far as they're concerned."

"It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these

affairs," he said. "How simple it would be if there were no parties to

them but the lovers! But nature is always insisting upon fathers and

mothers, and families on both sides."

XIX.

The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's people

alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.

Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange

corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing

from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes

rising half-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very

comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little

sea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.

Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering

vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and

there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where

it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us

a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein

cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails. The

gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for the

inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold. Flowers were

blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a dogged

energy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottages

and even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses were

double lines of low willows. At the first stop the train made, the

passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the

station, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proof

that vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements. But it

was not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly in

slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German

affections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.

A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, which

had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window. This

boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, if

their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism,

was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia's passengers, and

they met no more in their sea-solidarity. Of their table acquaintance the

Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking for

them. He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and was

going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg at

seven. He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven;

Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they were in the

same carriage with the Eltwins. He had got a letter from Mr. Stoller at

Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage rooms for them at

the hotel where he was going to stay with him.

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others

in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized

upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly

struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors. There was really

no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general

frenzy. With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win

the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector. The officer opened

one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there

ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go

to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which

were to go to the hotel overnight. At last the division was made; the

Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and

steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went

back into the station.

They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at the

door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a

metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands. They were not proud,

but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and

when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank,

they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have

been worse.

As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of

turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German

lands. It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which

the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult.

March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had not

been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but his

wife would not be amused. She said that no country which suffered such a

thing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no city

in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughly

trolleyed as Hamburg. The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and

everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights of

connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they drove

to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.

XX.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where

stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus,

over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public

garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, and

children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer of

the fatherland. It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was the

novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, and

their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain

immutably preposterous. They are apparently imagined for the stature of

sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are

triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the

bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over

the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned

into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.

The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier,

who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the

past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house. At the

dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means

bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what

entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they

had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed

to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner,

stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until they

were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them

up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward. He

let them get fairly seated before he started the car, and so lost the fun

of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each other

for support. The Germans have so little sense of humor that probably no

one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon the

floor. No one apparently found it droll that the conductor should touch

his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no one smiled at their

efforts to make him understand where they wished to go, and he did not

wink at the other passengers in trying to find out. Whenever the car

stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the dismounting

passenger had taken time to get well away from it. When the Marches got

into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond their street,

the conductor would not take their fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the

inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the

shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to

the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not

mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March's

self-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff

like a drum-major's, who left his place at the circus door to get their

tickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as

visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a

child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling

in their hearts. "One ought always to overpay them," March sighed, "and I

will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for it.

That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we come

out." As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who showed them

to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought every

conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by his

remorse.

"One ought to do it," he said. "We are of the quality of good geniuses to

these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in the

road. It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than we."

His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience between

them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus, of all

modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire. The house was full from

floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the two

Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the

universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either

German or English. They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic

attraction of "Miss Darlings, the American Star," as she was billed in

English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances

which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the

pantomimic piece which closed the evening.

This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed

itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which

purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany.

When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the

right mood to enjoy the allegory of "The Enchanted Mountain's Fantasy;

the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the Steep

Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains,

which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the

over-40-feet-high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day's

Circus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy

Ballet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel,

Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen

Splendor of Costume." The Marches were happy in this allegory, and

happier in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent, and

which here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces of

the 'coryphees' to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures.

They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment, of

good-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they would

have got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a pang.

They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished,

and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too

poignant. In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release

from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as

the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them.

Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe

quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of

seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she

have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the

Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in

Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the

truth, to know why she had not met any others. She had read much of the

prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push

her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman,

and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it. But she

had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kind

had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in

the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few

officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

XXI.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young

German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast. He said

Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large

imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact

there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities

chose to indulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyful

flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from

military service. He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man

reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill

health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest

blessing of heaven. He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should

be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to

take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to

say if there were not something that he could do for them.

"Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who

could think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was

in Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants

to look him up everywhere."

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man

had apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs.

March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but she

was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back

gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in

Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know

the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter

shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and

joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into

their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should

see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it

rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the

unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade

their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he

should by no means Miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of

a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to revere it

more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the

sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest

moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock,

whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt, when

he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish

government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about

among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine

might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any

sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety

of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy

would have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the little

crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of

question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay. To a

man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and

blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a

stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but he

had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where

he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and

drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their

limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front

escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,

and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness

that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.

They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no

apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon

them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their

timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in bands

quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in

successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything

the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves

upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which

brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set

ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the

traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They

could not have said which delighted them more--the houses in the

immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and

the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and

they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in

some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which

Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous

activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the

turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her

shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness

of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and

seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this

gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards

made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. In

the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the

greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic

glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a

quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States

seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets

through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity,

that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful

new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but

it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public

edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger. He could

not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when

he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like

the New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; people

were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but they

were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the

Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its

clamor. He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first,

examples of modern German art. The custodian led him gently about and

said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how

bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any

of them.

XXII.

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of

people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge

of their baggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where

they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties

of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered

themselves for recognition. A porter vanished with their hand-baggage

before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters

made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his

tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him

find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of

alien boxes. One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as

much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrap

of paper which recorded their number and destination. The interpreter and

the porters took their fees with a professional effect of

dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking and

eating and drinking in the restaurant. They burst through with the rest

when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the

porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent upon

escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had got

very good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliated

by their needless tumult.

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful

joy in some of the long-estranged facts. The road was rougher than the

roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the

unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage. Mrs.

March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads

which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg

sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward

her. Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans

are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to

Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however

young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a

lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to

secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that

stage. But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information

about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to

make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error. At the

point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with

a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been

forgotten. She said she could not see how any people could be both so

selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying

something offensive:

"You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you

are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are."

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

"Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how

despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human

beings?"

This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at

last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him. The

darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few

simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely

wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and

checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain

that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.

The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was here

and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an

English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as

the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and

this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.

She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and

was going home to Potsdam for a visit. She seemed like a German girl out

of 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to

invest herself with some romantic interest as an American. She failed to

move the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense

bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them

just before they left their hotel. She failed, later, on the same ground

with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at

Magdeburg, and talked over the 'London Illustrated News' with an

English-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact

of Mrs. March's nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it,

apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall

with fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and

could make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by

saying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come across

the sea.

"Yes," March assented, "but that was a great while ago, and Americans

were much rarer than they are now in Europe. The Italians are so much

more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you

wanted to impress them. Heaven knows how little they cared! And then, you

were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought so."

"Yes," she sighed, "and now I'm a plain old woman."

"Oh, not quite so bad as that."

"Yes, I am! Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss

Triscoe?"

"Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl. They would have found

her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have

had to have been here thirty years ago."

She laughed a little ruefully. "Well, at any rate, I should like to know

how Miss Triscoe would have affected them."

"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living

here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I could

imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she

clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the

royalties to her friend. There is romance for you!"

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'

journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through

the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent

except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline

purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense of the

past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the

head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the

endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in

the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found

themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick

succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them. The

spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his

consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing. This

linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent the

next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions

tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since

it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally

restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of

aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which

afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so

characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself

Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale

yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly

associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather

more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a

quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided

with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the

rain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be in that

sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was

sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others. It

had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere

disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France. These

monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records

of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign

foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be. It is

not for the victories of a people that any other people can care. The

wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or

what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and

sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them,

till time has softened it to a memory

"Of old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago."

It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant

satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the

Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of

1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of

the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field

where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it

always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore

years before. Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for the

sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern character of

Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal function; and

March was more taken with the notion of the little gardens which his

guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of Leipsic and

enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes. He saw certain of

these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and sometimes

furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his pleasure in

the evening air, with his family. The guide said he had such a garden

himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised vegetables

and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied that on

the simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him a

glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their character

of victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon. But probably they

would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on making

themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over

nationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was

imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three

years' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the

language, he might not have risen to this. He would have tried, for he

was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' by

profession. There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing race

(which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the

perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that

the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper

of a small restaurant. He gladly abandoned his business to the care of

his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with

strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal to

do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they

dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his

prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble

floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole

place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who

seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch

or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature

of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments

of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,

how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they

were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on

them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their

ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared

themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt

falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to

art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's maker

and one's neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old

Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in

passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is

redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his

quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet

beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into

suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals,

which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure

boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent

bridges, even during the drizzle. There seemed to be no churches to do,

and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them

that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene

of Napoleon's first great defeat.

By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at the

little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relics

from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it. Old

muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums,

gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the

murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations,

autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all

the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind,

filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a

loud pounding voice and a bad breath. When he wished them to enjoy some

gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte's expense, and

put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible that

March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that the

French had not won the battle of Leipsic. He walked away musing pensively

upon the traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of history when a breath

could so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had cleansed

his lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still a

Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground where

Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empire

slipping through his blood-stained fingers. It was with difficulty that

he could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the

stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out then

or afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon's

or not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly's.

While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled

by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite

quarter, and advancing toward them. He wore the imperial crossed by the

pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, and

March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third

Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming

ruin in the face.

"Why, it's Miss Triscoe!" cried his wife, and before March had noticed

the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushed

upon each other, and encountered with a kiss. At the same time the visage

of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General Triscoe, who

gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.

The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting two

days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distant

prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble

stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been

on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven. He might still have been in a pout

with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and

he said, "What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!

His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had

some chance of being civilized under the French. All this unification of

nationalities is the great humbug of the century. Every stupid race

thinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set back

a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about;

and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up. What a farce it is!

What's become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, or

the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?"

March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put by

General Triscoe made it offensive. "I don't know. Isn't it rather

quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts?

The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before them

were. And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peace

is civilization. Perhaps after a great many ages people will come

together through their real interests, the human interests; but at

present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism can

unite them. By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it."

"Perhaps," said the general, discontentedly. "I don't see much promise of

any kind in the future."

"Well, I don't know. When you think of the solid militarism of Germany,

you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you

think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in

Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army is

the great field of the Socialist propaganda. The army itself may be

shaped into the means of democracy--even of peace."

"You're very optimistic," said Triscoe, curtly. "As I read the signs, we

are not far from universal war. In less than a year we shall make the

break ourselves in a war with Spain." He looked very fierce as he

prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.

"Well, I'll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war

with Spain. You can't ask more than that, General Triscoe?"

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the 'battle of

Leipsic', or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men.

For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs

on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of

geological remoteness. The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by her

father's having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way of

Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without

stopping in Hamburg. They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained the

whole day before, and they had not gone out. She asked when Mrs. March

was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next morning; her

husband wished to begin his cure at once.

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any

good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms.

"Oh, he hasn't any. But I know he can't be well--with his gloomy

opinions."

"They may come from his liver," said Mrs. March. "Nearly everything of

that kind does. I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at

times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is

the great place for that, you know."

"Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn't like Dresden.

It isn't very far, is it?"

They referred to Mrs. March's Baedeker together, and found that it was

five hours.

"Yes, that is what I thought," said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness

which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.

"If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel.

We're going to Pupp's; most of the English and Americans go to the hotels

on the Hill, but Pupp's is in the thick of it in the lower town; and it's

very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he's been there often. Mr. Burnamy is to get

our rooms."

"I don't suppose I can get papa to go," said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely

that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to

Carlsbad with Burnamy--probably on the way from Cuxhaven. She looked up

from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground. "You didn't meet

him here this morning?"

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, "Has

Mr. Burnamy been here?"

"He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided

to stop over a day. They left on the twelve-o'clock train to-day."

Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts

betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.

"No, we didn't see him," she said, carelessly.

The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe said,

"We're going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere,

Mrs. March."

"Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can't; it's so

little!"

"Agatha," said the girl's father, "Mr. March tells me that the museum

over there is worth seeing."

"Well," the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches,

and moved gracefully away with her father.

"I should have thought it was Agnes," said Mrs. March, following them

with her eyes before she turned upon her husband. "Did he tell you

Burnamy had been here? Well, he has! He has just gone on to Carlsbad. He

made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with

her."

"Did she say that?"

"No, but of course he did."

"Then it's all settled?"

"No, it isn't settled. It's at the most interesting point."

"Well, don't read ahead. You always want to look at the last page."

"You were trying to look at the last page yourself," she retorted, and

she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the

affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him

agree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father to Carlsbad was only a

question of time.

They parted heart's-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was

affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel

door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther

room when they went down to supper. The waiter, much distracted from

their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast

party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon. The

revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might

not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were

apparently set to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the

university town. They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their

fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps

caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue. They were not

easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the

dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were

sometimes both students and bicyclers. As bicyclers they kept about in

the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened,

they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and

waltz in the square before the hotel. At one moment of the holiday some

chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes

sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel

streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered

with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of

ribbons somewhere. It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was

as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at

home.

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their

different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband

find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest in

the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they were

not content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged it

in every pleasure and employment of civil life. He estimated, perhaps not

very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore citizens'

dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of the

women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women had

their peasant costume.

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the

city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an

hour's interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with

the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the

eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their

associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from

them. This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a

woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a

German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender

young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of

the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the

common hire, while the man took the common tip. They made haste to leave

the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to the

Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the

agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance. The idea of her colonial

progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping

imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages

from her Central-African possessions. They were getting their supper at

the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around

the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were

not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an

old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand and

began to chase a boy round the camp. The boy was lighter-footed, and

easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket. None of the

other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting

for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled away

to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves

with the image of Old Leipsic.

This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and

Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in

the old streets of Hamburg. A drama had just begun to be represented on a

platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century

beer-house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in

the costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in

the open air. Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of

it a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any

more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century. But it

drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play,

and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy

beyond the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a special

interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and

genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.

From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted

the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with

an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous

physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences

and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as

a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide

had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content

with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became

quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or

seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and

were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind

hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able to note, rather

more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a very

nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to an

agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted.

Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier and

guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefully

as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved. The encounters

always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with

a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned himself after one of them as

the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise. "It

is a life of excitements, but not of movements," he explained to March;

and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not go

to Carlsbad too. "For sugar?" he asked, as if there were overmuch of it

in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, "No; liver."

"Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground

with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in

America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the

telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying

that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were

as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their

train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all

the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly 'traeger' had done his best to get them

the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so

poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother

and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together. Their

compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these

were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March

had got a window open it did not matter, really.

He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in

theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the

elder lady said in English, "Let me show you," and came to his help.

The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to

different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear,

and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhaps

they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had

cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with

an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likes to do

these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a family

of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken,

abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they entered into a

comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from which it seemed

that the objects and interests of cultivated people in Berlin were quite

the same as those of cultivated people in New York. Each of the parties

to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their respective

civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm and virtue

to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one another

that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad, the

mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she had

admired. In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowing

speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude.

"That was very pretty of her, my dear," said March. "You couldn't have

done that."

"No," she confessed; "I shouldn't have had the courage. The courage of my

emotions," she added, thoughtfully.

"Ah, that's the difference! A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian

couldn't. Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your

convictions?"

"I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of

everything that I used to be sure of."

He laughed, and then he said, "I was thinking how, on our wedding

journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered

you a rose."

"Well?"

"That was to your pretty youth. Now the gracious stranger gives you a

folding stool."

"To rest my poor old feet. Well, I would rather have it than a rose,

now."

"You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower

that time; I noticed it. I didn't see that you looked so very different.

To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but

rosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;

they will keep in any climate."

She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh. "Yes, our age

caricatures our youth, doesn't it?"

"I don't think it gets much fun out of it," he assented.

"No; but it can't help it. I used to rebel against it when it first

began. I did enjoy being young."

"You did, my dear," he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it,

because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could

not bear its expression. "And so did I; and we were both young a long

time. Travelling brings the past back, don't you think? There at that

restaurant, where we stopped for dinner--"

"Yes, it was charming! Just as it used to be! With that white cloth, and

those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the

dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was so

nice! I'm never going home; you may, if you like."

"You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our

railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European."

"I had to do that. But I knew better; they don't begin to be."

"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alike

everywhere. It's the expression of the common civilization of the world.

When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found

that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether I was at

home or abroad. And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this train

which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I didn't

know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot. To be sure,

Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at

Eger, and so that came to the same thing. It's these confounded fifty-odd

years. I used to recollect everything."

He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which

had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had

crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morning and early

afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were

cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow

fields between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger, there was

something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low

hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a

mountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations were

shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the

scenery and the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of

the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting

water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Along

the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were

at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls

were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. At

an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the

children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in

Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question

whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him. He sat

down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had

tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and

tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal

expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,

which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and

now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself. She refused to share

in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the

placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take

away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with

that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one who

profits by travel.

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars

Calm of those who have logic on their side

Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance

Explained perhaps too fully

Futility of travel

Humanity may at last prevail over nationality

Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much

Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of

Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony

Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous

Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel

Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all

Our age caricatures our youth

Prices fixed by his remorse

Recipes for dishes and diseases

Reckless and culpable optimism

Repeated the nothings they had said already

She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that

She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression

Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism

They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart

Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine

Wilful sufferers

Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart

Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests

Work he was so fond of and so weary of

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY