They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other because

it proved second-rate in everything but its charges. They ate a poorish

table d'hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart to get a

rise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which fed upon the

crumbs about their feet while they dined. Their English-speaking waiter

said that it was a very warm evening, and they never knew whether this

was because he was a humorist, or because he was lonely and wished to

talk, or because it really was a warm evening, for Berlin. When they had

finished, they went out and drove about the greater part of the evening

looking for another hotel, whose first requisite should be that it was

not on Unter den Linden. What mainly determined Mrs. March in favor of

the large, handsome, impersonal place they fixed upon was the fact that

it was equipped for steam-heating; what determined March was the fact

that it had a passenger-office where when he wished to leave, he could

buy his railroad tickets and have his baggage checked without the

maddening anxiety, of doing it at the station. But it was precisely in

these points that the hotel which admirably fulfilled its other functions

fell short. The weather made a succession of efforts throughout their

stay to clear up cold; it merely grew colder without clearing up, but

this seemed to offer no suggestion of steam for heating their bleak

apartment and the chilly corridors to the management. With the help of a

large lamp which they kept burning night and day they got the temperature

of their rooms up to sixty; there was neither stove nor fireplace, the

cold electric bulbs diffused a frosty glare; and in the vast, stately

dining-room with its vaulted roof, there was nothing to warm them but

their plates, and the handles of their knives and forks, which, by a

mysterious inspiration, were always hot. When they were ready to go,

March experienced from the apathy of the baggage clerk and the reluctance

of the porters a more piercing distress than any he had known at the

railroad stations; and one luckless valise which he ordered sent after

him by express reached his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with an

accumulation of charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits,

and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English

railroad hotels. They looked from their windows down into a gardened

square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of Berlin

and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind the cold

any more than the stone kings and generals. The aspect of this square,

like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of the

imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris. Even the

rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French

taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin. The suggestion of

Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic

which the city wears in its native air. The crowd lacks this as much as

the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the men

except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no style

such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets. The

Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the

little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is

ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there

is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in

New York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty

passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many

streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick

archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side

you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made to

serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebration

of the German triumph over France. Berlin has never the presence of a

great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence.

There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking

population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages. The

prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy

heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture. There

are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe

streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual

Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the

world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.

They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they

poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in

niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street

corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which

fails of any impression. If they were only furiously baroque they would

be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is a

self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic, more

noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass. This offensive

art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic spirit, and

bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in literature bears

to romance. It finds its apotheosis in the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I.,

a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering bronze, commemorating

the victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the war with the last French

Emperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the victors by its ugliness.

The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men and animals backs away from

the imperial palace, and saves itself too soon from plunging over the

border of a canal behind it, not far from Rauch's great statue of the

great Frederic. To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noble

work is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic

acting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned

and bewildered by its wild explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to the

imperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the obligation

to visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them. They entered the court

without opposition from the sentinel, and joined other strangers

straggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner of the

building, where after they had increased to some thirty, a custodian took

charge of them, and led them up a series of inclined plains of brick to

the state apartments. In the antechamber they found a provision of

immense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put on for their

passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy slippers were

designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and upon the mixed

company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree humiliating. The

women's skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the men were openly put

to shame, and they shuffled forward with their bodies at a convenient

incline like a company of snow-shoers. In the depths of his own abasement

March heard a female voice behind him sighing in American accents, "To

think I should be polishing up these imperial floors with my republican

feet!"

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his own

heart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in the

historical order of the family portraits recording the rise of the

Prussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors. He began to realize here

the fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is not

the effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity. There is

nothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodies

and proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of French

art it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pride

in the German triumph over the French in war. March found it tiresome

beyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense of

it with his felt shoes. "Well," he confided to his wife when they were

fairly out-of-doors, "if Prussia rose in the strength of silence, as

Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and tall

talk."

"Yes, isn't she!" Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire for

excess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerly

about her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which ought

to have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly because

the troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly more

in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington. Again the

German officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when she met

them on the side-walks. There were scarcely any of them, and perhaps that

might have been the reason why they were not more aggressive; but a whole

company of soldiers marching carelessly up to the palace from the

Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as our own militia

often puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as they looked

at her. She declared that personally there was nothing against the

Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and modest-looking men;

it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, that they,

began to bully and to brag.

LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Linden

almost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into with

them. It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to fact

and form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an English

dinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiter who

served it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligent

appreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectful

opinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held. After the manner

of strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting from

such of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and it

would really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with the

world at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and car

conductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers and

ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen; for by

these rather than by its society women and its statesmen and divines, is

it really judged in the books of travellers; some attention also should

be paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised. In the railroad

cafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches that if they

had not been people of great strength of character he would have undone

the favorable impression the soldiers and civilians of Berlin generally

had been at such pains to produce in them; and throughout the week of

early September which they passed there, it rained so much and so

bitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they might have come away

thinking it's the worst climate in the world, if it had not been for a

man whom they saw in one of the public gardens pouring a heavy stream

from his garden hose upon the shrubbery already soaked and shuddering in

the cold. But this convinced them that they were suffering from weather

and not from the climate, which must really be hot and dry; and they went

home to their hotel and sat contentedly down in a temperature of sixty

degrees. The weather, was not always so bad; one day it was dry cold

instead of wet cold, with rough, rusty clouds breaking a blue sky;

another day, up to eleven in the forenoon, it was like Indian summer;

then it changed to a harsh November air; and then it relented and ended

so mildly, that they hired chairs in the place before the imperial palace

for five pfennigs each, and sat watching the life before them. Motherly

women-folk were there knitting; two American girls in chairs near them

chatted together; some fine equipages, the only ones they saw in Berlin,

went by; a dog and a man (the wife who ought to have been in harness was

probably sick, and the poor fellow was forced to take her place) passed

dragging a cart; some schoolboys who had hung their satchels upon the low

railing were playing about the base of the statue of King William III. in

the joyous freedom of German childhood.

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine, but to the

Americans, who were Southern by virtue of their sky, the brightness had a

sense of lurking winter in it, such as they remembered feeling on a sunny

day in Quebec. The blue heaven looked sad; but they agreed that it fitly

roofed the bit of old feudal Berlin which forms the most ancient wing of

the Schloss. This was time-blackened and rude, but at least it did not

try to be French, and it overhung the Spree which winds through the city

and gives it the greatest charm it has. In fact Berlin, which is

otherwise so grandiose without grandeur and so severe without

impressiveness, is sympathetic wherever the Spree opens it to the sky.

The stream is spanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well be

unpicturesque, especially if they have statues to help them out. The

Spree abounds in bridges, and it has a charming habit of slow hay-laden

barges; at the landings of the little passenger-steamers which ply upon

it there are cafes and summer-gardens, and these even in the inclement

air of September suggested a friendly gayety.

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevated road in Berlin which

they made in an impassioned memory of the elevated road in New York. The

brick viaducts which carry this arch the Spree again and again in their

course through and around the city, but with never quite such spectacular

effects as our spidery tressels, achieve. The stations are pleasant,

sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, but have not the

comic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours, and are not so frequent. The road

is not so smooth, the cars not so smooth-running or so swift. On the

other hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are never

overcrowded. The line is at times above, at times below the houses, and

at times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs. The train

whirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old houses,

into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up without

order or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and along

the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided the

vacant lots. Everywhere the city was growing out over the country, in

blocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellow

brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburban

dwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went two

successive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has some

admirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but

on both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them.

The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him and

asked, "Wie gestern?" and from this he argued an affectionate constancy

in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of strangers.

At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized his signature

and remarked that it did not look like the signature in his letter of

credit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the moneyed classes of

Prussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind doubt by Hebrew

bankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews were politer than

the Christians in Germany. In starting for Potsdam he asked a traeger

where the Potsdam train was and the man said, "Dat train dare," and in

coming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and she thanked him

in English. From these incidents, both occurring the same day in the same

place, the inference of a widespread knowledge of our language in all

classes of the population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization in

the capital. He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainy

afternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of the

Thiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifference

to the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather. One evening at a

summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the 'Puppenfee' and the

operetta of 'Hansel and Gretel', he observed that the greater part of the

audience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and he

noted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number of

Americans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where they

mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of them

in the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came out,

confidently addressed him in English. But he took stock of his

impressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all, that

he could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of the

environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in the

Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they had

a great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds of

horsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near to

the popular life. They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society by

driving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautiful

houses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green park

from the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated and

delightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing but

their unsupported conjecture.

LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin. They

chose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandy

plains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills surrounding

Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick's sake,

and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waited

with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade before

they were led through Voltaire's room and Frederick's death chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Souci

even in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of the

great Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes of

their owners. The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as the

Germans conceived it. The gardened terrace from which the low, one-story

building, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into a

many-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally French

the colonnaded front opening to a perspective of artificial ruins, with

broken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against the

sky. Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and the

furnishing. At that time there, was in fact no other taste, and

Frederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved upon

French taste even in his intimate companionship. The droll story of his

coquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be his

guest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the very

air in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which they

parted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one side,

and with merciless mockery on the other. Voltaire was long ago revenged

upon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in their

comedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick's fame the trace of those

lacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is the

singular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one feels

there the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important to

mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of the

lovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wander

among the statues and the roses heavy with the shower. Then they walked

back to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses in

differing architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal of

beauty. It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococco

statues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials of

royalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh and

spirit of their visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and

before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they

dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick

built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved in

the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came to

his kingdom. It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on its

terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroque

allegories of all sorts: Everywhere the statues outnumbered the visitors,

who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally did not

mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in a

mildewed restaurant, where a compatriotic accent caught their ear in a

voice saying to the waiter, "We are in a hurry." They looked round and

saw that it proceeded from the pretty nose of a young American girl, who

sat with a party of young American girls at a neighboring table. Then

they perceived that all the people in that restaurant were Americans,

mostly young girls, who all looked as if they were in a hurry. But

neither their beauty nor their impatience had the least effect with the

waiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, and alarmed the Marches

with the misgiving that they should not have time for the final palace on

their list.

This was the palace where the father of Frederick, the mad old Frederick

William, brought up his children with that severity which Solomon urged

but probably did not practise. It is a vast place, but they had time for

it all, though the custodian made the most of them as the latest comers

of the day, and led them through it with a prolixity as great as their

waiter's. He was a most friendly custodian, and when he found that they

had some little notion of what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with his

patronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests. They saw

everything but the doorway where the faithful royal father used to lie in

wait for his children and beat them, princes and princesses alike, with

his knobby cane as they came through. They might have seen this doorway

without knowing it; but from the window overlooking the parade-ground

where his family watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic grenadiers, they

made sure of just such puddles as Frederick William forced his family to

sit with their feet in, while they dined alfresco on pork and cabbage;

and they visited the room of the Smoking Parliament where he ruled his

convives with a rod of iron, and made them the victims of his bad jokes.

The measuring-board against which he took the stature of his tall

grenadiers is there, and one room is devoted to those masterpieces which

he used to paint in the agonies of gout. His chef d'oeuvre contains a

figure with two left feet, and there seemed no reason why it might not.

have had three. In another room is a small statue of Carlyle, who did so

much to rehabilitate the house which the daughter of it, Wilhelmina, did

so much to demolish in the regard of men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there is a chamber where

Napoleon slept, which is not likely to be occupied soon by any other

self-invited guest of his nation. It is perhaps to keep the princes of

Europe humble that hardly a palace on the Continent is without the

chamber of this adventurer, who, till he stooped to be like them, was

easily their master. Another democracy had here recorded its invasion in

the American stoves which the custodian pointed out in the corridor when

Mrs. March, with as little delay as possible, had proclaimed their

country. The custodian professed an added respect for them from the fact,

and if he did not feel it, no doubt he merited the drink money which they

lavished on him at parting.

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when he let them out of his

carriage at the station, he excused the rainy day to them. He was a merry

fellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughed at the bad weather,

as if it had been a good joke on them.

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shone on the stems of the

pines on the way back to Berlin, contributed to the content in which they

reviewed their visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the place was perfectly

charming, and that it was incomparably expressive of kingly will and

pride. These had done there on the grand scale what all the German

princes and princelings had tried to do in imitation and emulation of

French splendor. In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a historical growth as

at Versailles, but was the effect of family genius, in which there was

often the curious fascination of insanity.

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of the

Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies,

personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are

gathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty line who

stand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate.

father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure,

terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears something of the

madness which showed in the life of the sire.

They went through many rooms in which the memorials of the kings and

queens, the emperors and empresses were carefully ordered, and felt no

kindness except before the relics relating to the Emperor Frederick and

his mother. In the presence of the greatest of the dynasty they

experienced a kind of terror which March expressed, when they were safely

away, in the confession of his joy that those people were dead.

LXVI.

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. March

had such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the orders

of an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went to

bed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and his

convalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not always

keep his temper. In the absence of actual offence, either from his

daughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form; it

centred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward Rose

Adding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in the

same measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part, directly

or indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold.

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he was

constantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that he

did not over-value Burnamy's sacrifice and devotion, and that it was not

an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about. In

giving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotel

altogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as great

vexation as he had accepted the room. He besought him not to go, but so

ungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for his

manner by the kindness of her own.

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were not

eager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she had

hitherto shared only with him. He was old, and certain luxuries had

become habits if not necessaries with him. Of course he did not say this

to himself; and still less did he say it to her. But he let her see that

he did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such close

relations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches

were somehow to blame for it. This made it impossible for her to write at

once to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that it

should not make her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoid him; she would

not let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she felt

his kindness and was glad of his help.

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as a

fellow-countryman would have been precious. He got them a doctor, against

General Triscoe's will; he went for his medicines; he lent him books and

papers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him. But with the girl he

attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing like

the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantage

in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep

he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room

of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: "I suppose

you must have been all over Weimar by this time."

"Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interesting

place. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left."

"And you enjoy that! I saw"--she added this with a little unnecessary

flush--"your poem in the paper you lent papa."

"I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't." He laughed,

and she said:

"You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place."

"It isn't lying about loose, exactly." Even in the serious and perplexing

situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with

her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace

conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of a more

fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater

world. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing them

between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return to

the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her ladylike

composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same

person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that

night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there had

been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave her

to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that

there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did

so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing

enough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg with

the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose's collapse, and of

his mother's flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was so

fortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of going to

Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strange

they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic

character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself

was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his

hopes. With a lover's indefinite power of blinding himself to what is

before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him,

more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for her

to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in the

little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always the

only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this

world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness of

their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. The

Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been

the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at

the station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on his

arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the

irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a zeal

that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in fact

preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August

knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable

English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general

gave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt to

encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in

the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of the

wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one day

suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened

hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a bench in

the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other frequenters

of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young strangers, so that

they would silently rise and leave it to them when they saw them coming.

Apparently they yielded not only to their right, but to a certain

authority which resides in lovers, and which all other men, and

especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is

difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which

Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.

But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that

of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled

to say what it was. It was known that the gracious young lady's father,

who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact that

they were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever was

phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other's society.

If their free American association was indistinguishably like the peasant

informality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of Kenby and

Mrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not be fully

cognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing to prevent

it. His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he believed

himself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have had some

other physician if he had not found consolation in their difference of

opinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled to cherish for

the doctor in view of the man's complete ignorance of the case. In proof

of his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed some time after

the doctor said he might get up.

Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not till

then that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter and

Burnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipated

theirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which had

brought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothing

more of it. The divine patience and confidence of their youth might

sometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who had

seen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their reunion

in Weimar. To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understanding

which had been made without reference to his wishes, and had not been

directly brought to his knowledge.

"Agatha," he said, after due note of a gay contest between her and

Burnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent to

his room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the open

air, "how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?"

"Why, I don't know!" she answered, startled from her work of beating the

sofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand. "I

never asked him." She looked down candidly into his face where he sat in

an easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa. "What makes you

ask?"

He answered with another question. "Does he know that we had thought of

staying here?"

"Why, we've always talked of that, haven't we? Yes, he knows it. Didn't

you want him to know it, papa? You ought to have begun on the ship, then.

Of course I've asked him what sort of place it was. I'm sorry if you

didn't want me to."

"Have I said that? It's perfectly easy to push on to Paris. Unless--"

"Unless what?" Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully. But

in spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and strength

and courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man.

He said querulously, "I don't see why you take that tone with me. You

certainly know what I mean. But if you don't care to deal openly with me,

I won't ask you." He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same time

a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her forehead.

"You must know--you're not a child," he continued, still with averted

eyes, "that this sort of thing can't go on... It must be something else,

or it mustn't be anything at all. I don't ask you for your confidence,

and you know that I've never sought to control you."

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently or

provisionally, "No."

"And I don't seek to do so now. If you have nothing that you wish to tell

me--"

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had not

heard him, "Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?"

"I will lie down when I feel like it," he answered. "Send August with the

supper; he can look after me."

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she left

him without apparent grievance, saying quietly, "I will send August."

LXVII.

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy. She asked August, when

she gave him her father's order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room,

where, when it came, she remained thinking so long that it was rather

tepid by the time she drank it.

Then she went to her window, and looked out, first above and next below.

Above, the moon was hanging over the gardened hollow before the Museum

with the airy lightness of an American moon. Below was Burnamy behind the

tubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair against the house wall,

with the spark of his cigar fainting and flashing like an American

firefly. Agatha went down to the door, after a little delay, and seemed

surprised to find him there; at least she said, "Oh!" in a tone of

surprise.

Burnamy stood up, and answered, "Nice night."

"Beautiful!" she breathed. "I didn't suppose the sky in Germany could

ever be so clear."

"It seems to be doing its best."

"The flowers over there look like ghosts in the light," she said

dreamily.

"They're not. Don't you want to get your hat and wrap, and go over and

expose the fraud?"

"Oh," she answered, as if it were merely a question of the hat and wrap,

"I have them."

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while, long enough to have

ascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, if

they had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat,

they sat down, and she said, "I don't know that I've seen the moon so

clear since we left Carlsbad." At the last word his heart gave a jump

that seemed to lodge it in his throat and kept him from speaking, so that

she could resume without interruption, "I've got something of yours, that

you left at the Posthof. The girl that broke the dishes found it, and

Lili gave it to Mrs. March for you." This did not account for Agatha's

having the thing, whatever it was; but when she took a handkerchief from

her belt, and put out her hand with it toward him, he seemed to find that

her having it had necessarily followed. He tried to take it from her, but

his own hand trembled so that it clung to hers, and he gasped, "Can't you

say now, what you wouldn't say then?"

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore; but she apparently

felt it in her turn as he had felt it in his. She whispered back, "Yes,"

and then she could not get out anything more till she entreated in a

half-stifled voice, "Oh, don't!"

"No, no!" he panted. "I won't--I oughtn't to have done it--I beg your

pardon--I oughtn't to have spoken,--even--I--"

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulous fashion, but still

between laughing and crying, "I meant to make you. And now, if you're

ever sorry, or I'm ever too topping about anything, you can be perfectly

free to say that you'd never have spoken if you hadn't seen that I wanted

you to."

"But I didn't see any such thing," he protested. "I spoke because I

couldn't help it any longer."

She laughed triumphantly. "Of course you think so! And that shows that

you are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing. But I am going

to have the credit of it. I knew that you were holding back because you

were too proud, or thought you hadn't the right, or something. Weren't

you?" She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge: "If

you pretend, that you weren't I shall never forgive you!"

"But I was! Of course I was. I was afraid--"

"Isn't that what I said?" She triumphed over him with another laugh, and

cowered a little closer to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and

now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the

garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every

point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible

knowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear delight of this

encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present

distinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to

be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see

her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her. Another

point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but

had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant

somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough

to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller. With

further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong

in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to

Mr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in

his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that

obscure passage of his life. He preferred to put the question by, and

perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to

the fact that they were now each other's forever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at

least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At her

mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which

expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his

arm to the hands which she had clasped within it. "He has always

appreciated you," she said courageously, "and I know he will see it in

the right light."

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability

finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy

accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see

General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

"No, I will see him," she said, "I wish to see him first; he will expect

it of me. We had better go in, now," she added, but neither made any

motion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in the

other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in

the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in going

to her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressure

under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her ways

and Burnamy's parted. She went into her own room, and softly opened the

door into her father's and listened.

"Well?" he said in a sort of challenging voice.

"Have you been asleep?" she asked.

"I've just blown out my light. What has kept you?"

She did not reply categorically. Standing there in the sheltering dark,

she said, "Papa, I wasn't very candid with you, this afternoon. I am

engaged to Mr. Burnamy."

"Light the candle," said her father. "Or no," he added before she could

do so. "Is it quite settled?"

"Quite," she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt. "That is, as

far as it can be, without you."

"Don't be a hypocrite, Agatha," said the general. "And let me try to get

to sleep. You know I don't like it, and you know I can't help it."

"Yes," the girl assented.

"Then go to bed," said the general concisely.

Agatha did not obey her father. She thought she ought to kiss him, but

she decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him a

tender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself into her

own room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the moonlight,

with a smile that never left her lips.

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the coming

day, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not much

greater than some moths, moving before her window. She pulled the valves

open and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling from

above. She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the great

central truth of the universe:

"I love you. L. J. B."

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

"So do I. Don't be silly. A. T."

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch.

She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutter

down from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep.

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, at

breakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier. Of the three involved

in the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respited

from it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the young

people. They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, if

bringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formality

of asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through was

unpleasant, but after all it was a formality. Agatha told him everything

that had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not that

cordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly not

hopelessly discouraging.

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly

as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general's

tray before going up to his room. The young fellow did not feel more at

his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the

general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted

upon the weather between them.

"I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy," said General

Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, "and I

suppose you know why you have come." The words certainly opened the way

for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had

abundant time to add, "I don't pretend that this event is unexpected, but

I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish you

to marry my daughter. I take it for granted that you are attached to each

other, and we won't waste time on that point. Not to beat about the bush,

on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting her

are. How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?"

"Fifteen hundred dollars," Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

"Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?"

"I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a

publisher." The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy's mind.

"Eighteen hundred. What did you get for your poem in March's book?"

"That's a very trifling matter: fifteen dollars."

"And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?"

"Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses. But I wouldn't take that,

General Triscoe," said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his 'lit de justice', passed this point in silence.

"Have you any one dependent on you?"

"My mother; I take care of my mother," answered Burnamy, proudly.

"Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?"

"I have none."

"Then you don't expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon

her means."

"I expect to do nothing of the kind!" cried Burnamy. "I should be

ashamed--I should feel disgraced--I should--I don't ask you--I don't ask

her till I have the means to support her--"

"If you were very fortunate," continued the general, unmoved by the young

fellow's pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived upon

his wife's means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter's, "if

you went back to Stoller--"

"I wouldn't go back to him. I don't say he's knowingly a rascal, but he's

ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I behaved

badly to him, and I'd give anything to undo the wrong I let him do

himself; but I'll never go back to him."

"If you went back, on your old salary," the general persisted pitilessly,

"you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up to

twenty-five hundred a year."

"Yes--"

"And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the

scale she is used to? I don't speak of your mother, who has the first

claim upon you."

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the

question was of Stoller, began to sink.

The general went on. "You ask me to give you my daughter when you haven't

money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a

stranger--"

"Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe," Burnamy protested. "You have

known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago

will tell you--"

"A stranger, and worse than a stranger," the general continued, so

pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost

smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. "It isn't a question of

liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so do

the Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself. You've

done me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little of you,

in spite of our three months' acquaintance; and that little is--But you

shall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential employ of a man

who trusted you, and you let him betray himself."

"I did. I don't excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But it

wasn't done maliciously; it wasn't done falsely; it was done

inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But it

wasn't; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and I

didn't! I can never outlive that."

"I know," said the general relentlessly, "that you have never attempted

any defence. That has been to your credit with me. It inclined me to

overlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you told

her you would never see her again. What did you expect me to think, after

that, of your coming back to see her? Or didn't you expect me to know

it?"

"I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you. But I don't excuse

that, either. It was acting a lie to come back. All I can say is that I

had to see her again for one last time."

"And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourself

to her."

"I couldn't help doing that."

"I don't say you could. I don't judge the facts at all. I leave them

altogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought to

say to such a man as you have shown yourself."

"No, I will say." The door into the adjoining room was flung open, and

Agatha flashed in from it.

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face. "Have you been

listening?" he asked.

"I have been hearing--"

"Oh!" As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged.

"I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room. I couldn't help hearing;

and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on,

after all you've said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than he

deserved."

"That doesn't justify me," Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost as

severely as she--had dealt with her father.

"Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly! And his wanting you to falsify

the whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you."

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they

both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went

on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to the

other.

"And besides, if it didn't justify you, what you have done yourself

would; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the

same as if you hadn't done it, as far as you are concerned; and that is

all I care for." Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heard

something like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and she

flushed a little as she added tremulously, "And I should never, never

blame you for it, after that; it's only trying to wriggle out of things

which I despise, and you've never done that. And he simply had to come

back," she turned to her father, "and tell me himself just how it was.

And you said yourself, papa--or the same as said--that he had no right to

suppose I was interested in his affairs unless he--unless--And I should

never have forgiven him, if he hadn't told me then that he that he had

come back because he--felt the way he did. I consider that that

exonerated him for breaking his word, completely. If he hadn't broken his

word I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and--and strangely.

And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably, so

delicately, that I don't believe he would ever have said anything

again--if I hadn't fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!" she cried at a

movement of remonstrance from Burnamy. "And I shall always be proud of

you for it." Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted his

eyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where Burnamy

stood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike impetuosity. "And

as for the rest," she declared, "everything I have is his; just as

everything of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if he wishes to take

me without anything, then he can have me so, and I sha'n't be afraid but

we can get along somehow." She added, "I have managed without a maid,

ever since I left home, and poverty has no terrors for me!"

LXVIII.

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldiers

learn. He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character,

and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiable

that they supplied good-humor for all. They flaunted their rapture in her

father's face as little as they could, but he may have found their serene

satisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to bear as

a more boisterous happiness would have been.

It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America,

and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employment

in New York. She was much surer than he that this could be done with

perfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was not

to be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his

living; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be no

talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time. It

included complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocal

analyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes,

ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses,

eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some account

of their several friends.

In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of what

they had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at every

instant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistent

anxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of their leaving

Weimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should spend a month

before sailing for New York. Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved,

of trying for something there on the New York-Paris Chronicle; and if he

got it they might not go home at once. His gains from that paper had eked

out his copyright from his book, and had almost paid his expenses in

getting the material which he had contributed to it. They were not so

great, however, but that his gold reserve was reduced to less than a

hundred dollars, counting the silver coinages which had remained to him

in crossing and recrossing frontiers. He was at times dimly conscious of

his finances, but he buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatible

with his status as Agatha's betrothed, if not unworthy of his character

as a lover in the abstract.

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in the

garden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important that

when it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy's umbrella,

and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings even

to let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father's packing.

Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the whole

afternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain in

undisturbed possession of his room as long as possible.

What chiefly remained to be put into the general's trunk were his coats

and trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, and

carefully folded and packed them. Then, to make sure that nothing had

been forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, and

stood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks.

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to be

something in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved to

be a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue satin

ribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a yard, was

of entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it had lain.

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examined

it near to, and then at arm's length. August stood by with a pair of the

general's trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agatha

absently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in his

eyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the withered

bouquet. Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers,

which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in the

closet. At August's smile it became something else. Still she asked

lightly enough, "Was ist loss, August?"

His smile deepened and broadened. "Fur die Andere," he explained.

Agatha demanded in English, "What do you mean by feardy ondery?"

"Oddaw lehdy."

"Other lady?" August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closed

the door into her own room, where the general had been put for the time

so as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down with

her hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands. "Now, August," she

said very calmly, "I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mir

sagen--what other lady--wass andere Dame--these flowers belonged

to--diese Blumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?"

August nodded brightly, and with German carefully adjusted to Agatha's

capacity, and with now and then a word or phrase of English, he conveyed

that before she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had been in

Weimar another American Fraulein with her Frau Mother; they had not

indeed staid in that hotel, but had several times supped there with the

young Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room before her Herr Father.

The young Herr had been much about with these American Damen, driving and

walking with them, and sometimes dining or supping with them at their

hotel, The Elephant. August had sometimes carried notes to them from the

young Herr, and he had gone for the bouquet which the gracious Fraulein

was holding, on the morning of the day that the American Damen left by

the train for Hanover.

August was much helped and encouraged throughout by the friendly

intelligence of the gracious Fraulein, who smiled radiantly in clearing

up one dim point after another, and who now and then supplied the English

analogues which he sought in his effort to render his German more

luminous.

At the end she returned to the work of packing, in which she directed

him, and sometimes assisted him with her own hands, having put the

bouquet on the mantel to leave herself free. She took it up again and

carried it into her own room, when she went with August to summon her

father back to his. She bade August say to the young Herr, if he saw him,

that she was going to sup with her father, and August gave her message to

Burnamy, whom he met on the stairs coming down as he was going up with

their tray.

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that evening Burnamy was less

able than usual to bear her absence in the hotel dining-room, and he went

up to a cafe in the town for his supper. He did not stay long, and when

he returned his heart gave a joyful lift at sight of Agatha looking out

from her balcony, as if she were looking for him. He made her a gay

flourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she came down to meet him at

the hotel door. She had her hat on and jacket over one arm and she joined

him at once for the farewell walk he proposed in what they had agreed to

call their garden.

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reached the place where

they always sat, she shifted her jacket to the other arm and uncovered

the hand in which she had been carrying the withered bouquet. "Here is

something I found in your closet, when I was getting papa's things out."

"Why, what is it?" he asked innocently, as he took it from her.

"A bouquet, apparently," she answered, as he drew the long ribbons

through his fingers, and looked at the flowers curiously, with his head

aslant.

"Where did you get it?"

"On the shelf."

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a long sigh, as of final

recollection, "Oh, yes," and then he said nothing; and they did not sit

down, but stood looking at each other.

"Was it something you got for me, and forgot to give me?" she asked in a

voice which would not have misled a woman, but which did its work with

the young man.

He laughed and said, "Well, hardly! The general has been in the room ever

since you came."

"Oh, yes. Then perhaps somebody left it there before you had the room?"

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, "No, I flung it up there I

had forgotten all about it."

"And you wish me to forget about it, too?" Agatha asked in a gayety of

tone that still deceived him.

"It would only be fair. You made me," he rejoined, and there was

something so charming in his words and way, that she would have been glad

to do it.

But she governed herself against the temptation and said, "Women are not

good at forgetting, at least till they know what."

"Oh, I'll tell you, if you want to know," he said with a laugh, and at

the words she--sank provisionally in their accustomed seat. He sat down

beside her, but not so near as usual, and he waited so long before he

began that it seemed as if he had forgotten again. "Why, it's nothing.

Miss Etkins and her mother were here before you came, and this is a

bouquet that I meant to give her at the train when she left. But I

decided I wouldn't, and I threw it onto the shelf in the closet."

"May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquet to her at the train?"

"Well, she and her mother--I had been with them a good deal, and I

thought it would be civil."

"And why did you decide not to be civil?"

"I didn't want it to look like more than civility."

"Were they here long?"

"About a week. They left just after the Marches came."

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted. She sat reclined in

the corner of the seat, with her head drooping. After an interval which

was long to Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the third finger of

her left hand, absently, as if she did not know what she was doing; but

when she had got it off she held it towards Burnamy and said quietly, "I

think you had better have this again," and then she rose and moved slowly

and weakly away.

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and he stood a moment

bewildered; then he pressed after her.

"Agatha, do you--you don't mean--"

"Yes," she said, without looking round at his face, which she knew was

close to her shoulder. "It's over. It isn't what you've done. It's what

you are. I believed in you, in spite of what you did to that man--and

your coming back when you said you wouldn't--and--But I see now that what

you did was you; it was your nature; and I can't believe in you any

more."

"Agatha!" he implored. "You're not going to be so unjust! There was

nothing between you and me when that girl was here! I had a right to--"

"Not if you really cared for me! Do you think I would have flirted with

any one so soon, if I had cared for you as you pretended you did for me

that night in Carlsbad? Oh, I don't say you're false. But you're

fickle--"

"But I'm not fickle! From the first moment I saw you, I never cared for

any one but you!"

"You have strange ways of showing your devotion. Well, say you are not

fickle. Say, that I'm fickle. I am. I have changed my mind. I see that it

would never do. I leave you free to follow all the turning and twisting

of your fancy." She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she gave him

no chance to get out the words that seemed to choke him. She began to

run, but at the door of the hotel she stopped and waited till he came

stupidly up. "I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy. I beg you will not see

me again, if you can help it before we go to-morrow. My father and I are

indebted to you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn't take any more

trouble on our account. August can see us off in the morning."

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while he was yet struggling

with his doubt of the reality of what had all so swiftly happened.

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change in the status to which

he had reconciled himself with so much difficulty, when he came down to

get into the omnibus for the train. Till then he had been too proud to

ask what had become of Burnamy, though he had wondered, but now he looked

about and said impatiently, "I hope that young man isn't going to keep us

waiting."

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but she said firmly, "He

isn't going, papa. I will tell you in the train. August will see to the

tickets and the baggage."

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-class compartment

to themselves. But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha's

confidences to her father were not full. She told her father that her

engagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very wrong

in Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy together.

As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty in

accepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealed

strongly to his contrary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly from his

sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to new

conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from an

engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, "I hope you're

not making a mistake."

"Oh, no," she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of

sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the

Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the

Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they

remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at

Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who

kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that

she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding

journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it

would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do

in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of the

same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe

as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape. One gray

little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval

walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more. There

was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog

began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersing

the cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the Russischer

Hof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shivering

in all their wraps till breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored the

portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all the

electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree.

Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed each

other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while the

summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted.

They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over their

breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interest

in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel. They were

fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and they

were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire. Many of

them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls running

before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processions

have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxiety

a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before

the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to

the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the

morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet.

What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an old

town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town,

handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets,

apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course

Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing

absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive

characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight. Some

sort of monument to the national victory over France there must have

been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record

of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware of gardened

squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic

edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the state

builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal

corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to the

Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at their

public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the most

plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay their

devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house they

revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter of

credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius of

Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled himself

by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. March

for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds'

birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born. The

public is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly place

they were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in the

Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar,

which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote. They wondered,

as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean little

court, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to that

understanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, had

meant to be inevitable. Then they became part of some such sight-seeing

retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar,

and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow

sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in

a certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both the

Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separate

house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or

yard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms. The

chief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the most

important is the little chamber in the third story where the poet first

opened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and

which, dying, he implored to be with him more. It is as large as his

death-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down

into the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for

the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet

square. In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is

fairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look

from the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt.

So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such

things go, it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and

well-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family

which Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial

quality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic's

breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer,

the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once

was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their

coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was still

so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze

of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer,

the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where the

German emperors were elected for so many centuries. As soon as an emperor

was chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of his

predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself

to the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in the

sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers

could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of

the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they

were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty

of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked

in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a

half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing

in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost,

and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this

cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other

fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the

easier part she had chosen. His only definite impression at the cathedral

seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he

had seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object of

interest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs.

March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadth

of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of the

morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of many

Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves to

learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it was

so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with its

bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They liked the

market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full of

fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because

there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedeker

that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the

marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews

had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They were

almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in

Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race,

prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner

so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and

electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran

Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. It

grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whom

March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when the

guard came, without asking their leave. Then the climate proved much

colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, and

would not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, or

the hills far off. He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as it

had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, "She may be

another Baroness!" At first he did not know what she meant, then he

remembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorly

enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife was

practising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and giving

her a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose. She failed to

profit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeable

woman, of no more perceptible distinction than their other

fellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (they

resolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he was

no other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way to

Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and

flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wet

sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminably

to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomer

and cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part of

the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, than even

Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like that, with double

rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign of

Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restriction

against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred. Otherwise they had to

confess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more proper

and dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America.

To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years'

start; but all the same the fact galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their

hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to

Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something

tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with

its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the

spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the

river's brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold

braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to

his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain have

had them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very

slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower,

and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of the

serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All these

retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove,

without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms,

and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant, not

because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of

wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange

demand.

"What!" she cried. "A fire in September!"

"Yes," March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by

the exigency, "yes, if September is cold."

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or

liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a

word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and in

less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least

sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. March

made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said she

would have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a supper

of chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when they

supped in her aunt's parlor there all those years ago. He wished to

compute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and he

went down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he found

himself alone with a young English couple and their little boy. They were

friendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable,

apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said he

had contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he was going to

Holland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which March

expected to find there. He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of

faith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of the

dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the court

without, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till the

little English boy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March's spirits certainly did not rise

when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at

another table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he had

met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the

elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the

younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed

to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct

and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style

bragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeable

fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had

become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one only

the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in his scorn

of the German landscape, the German weather, the German government, the

German railway management, and then turned out an American of German

birth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort when he went back to

her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she had discovered

standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was a French clock,

of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the first Empire, and it

looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon occupied Mayence early

in the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her conscience where,

in its danger from the heat of the stove, it rested with the weight of

the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled. She wondered that no one

had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and she required her husband

to remove it at once from the top of the stove to the mantel under the

mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a clock. He said nothing

could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began to fall all apart, like

a clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble base dropped-off; its

pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side. While Mrs. March

lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it together before any

one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new place. Then they both

breathed freer, and returned to sit down before the stove. But at the

same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined on the lacquered top,

the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would see it in the morning;

she would notice the removal of the clock, and would make a merit of

reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord, and in the end they would

be mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer this wrong they agreed to

restore it to its place, and, let it go to destruction upon its own

terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went to

bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in

Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal

joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his

window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of

pathos in the line:

"Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!"

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of

youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places,

with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen

silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he

remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke

early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though young,

were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves

kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw the street

filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some

in uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps, loosely

straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make

out. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said that

these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres,

and who were now going home. He promised March a translation of the song,

but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-going

remained the more poetic with him because its utterance remained

inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering

about the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit by

the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to the

cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there

added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people of

Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it by

preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an

ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive

offerings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled

themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and

ragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red

guide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle in

a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own

ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar a

priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was

as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle's, or whether somewhere in it he

felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and

old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river,

which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough river

looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both

as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making. The summer

of life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better return to his

own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal

town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any

one. A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really

a wish to be at work again. He said he must keep this from his wife, who

seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned

to the hotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer.

They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf

they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March

would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, and

he was afterwards glad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up

behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition

which the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeated

agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much,

and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had

plundered them of.

"Now I see," said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, "how

fortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe we

were the instruments of justice."

"Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?" asked her husband.

"The landlord has his own arrangement with justice. When he overcharges

his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my clock."

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the

clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine

as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. The

smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not so

bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March liked

the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy

shores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that,

and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he

remembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began to

come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence,

assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid

from the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the color

of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not

gainsay the friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they

showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since

realized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held silently

apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who kept the

Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an

Englishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was

he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or

was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?

He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of the

boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offer

him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually lifted a

shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and that

he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the young

man's eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he felt

that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again.

March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin to

eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the baskets

they had brought with them, or from the boat's provision. But he

prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer, through all the events

of the voyage; and took March's mind off the scenery with a sudden wrench

when he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance. At

the table d'hote, which was served when the landscape began to be less

interesting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across the

table to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout the

different courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt the

young man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for the

semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that he was a

Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at last

cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their former

Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantled

the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps. The

scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there were

certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than they

remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem was

more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, though

there were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed as

good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of them had been

restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into

trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere

gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the

broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American

dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more,

does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on

the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which

might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still you

know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the

Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.

Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be

storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really

got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure."

"Well, we have got no denkmal, either," said his wife, meaning the

national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had

just passed, "and that is something in our favor."

"It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was," he returned.

"The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rode

aboard the boat."

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that. He yielded, and began

to praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled slopes

of the upper river. He said they put him in mind of orchards that he had

known in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of travel,

after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in finding

something familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.