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THEIR

SILVER WEDDING

JOURNEY

A NotiH

BY
W. D. HOWELLS

- • V :

• • • • •

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1909

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THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

631293

A8TOR, LCNOX AND

TILOEN F • '• OAllONi.

R 19:3 L

Novels by
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

A Hazard of Nbw Fortunes $1.50

A Pair of Patient Lovers .... net i.is

A Parting and a Meeting. lUtistrated . . z.oo

An Imperative Duty x.oo

A Traveller from Altruria 1.50

Annie Kilburn 1.50

April Hopes 1.50

An Open-Eybd Conspiracy i.oo

Between the Dark and Daylight . . . 1.50

Fennel and Rue. Illustrated 1.50

Letters Home 1.50

Miss Bellard's Inspiration z.50

Questionable Shapes. lUustrated . . . z.50

Ragged Lady. Illustrated 1.75

The Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated . . . x.50

The Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated . x.sj

The Kbntons 1.50

The Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustretcd 1.75

The Quality of Mercy 1.50

The Shadow of a Dream i.oo

The Son of Royal Langbrith .... 3.00

The Story of a Play r.50

The World of Cha.scb z.so

Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated 1.50

Two Volume Edition s-oo

Through the Eye of a Needle .... 1.50

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, N. Y.

• • • ■ • • • ••• •

• • -. • • • • • ,

••• ! •• •• • ••

* • • • ml •
►. •••• ••••

» • • • • •

Copyricfat, 1899, by HAsrBB & Brothers.

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' THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

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• • • • «

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

" You need the rest," said the Business End ; " and
youp wife wants you to go, as well as your doctor. Be-
sides, it's your Sabbatical year, and you could send back
a lot of stuflF for the magazine."

" Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year ?" asked
the editor.

" No ; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience.
You needn't write a line while you're gone. I wish
you wouldn't for your own sake ; although every num-
ber that hasn't got you in it is a back number for me."

^' That's very nice of you, Fulkerson," said the editor.
" I suppose you realize that it's nine years since we took
Every Other Week from Dryfoos ?"

" Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical," said
Fulkerson. " The two extra years that you've put in
here, over and above the old-style Sabbatical seven, are
just so much more to your credit. It was your right to
go two years ago, and now it's your duty. Couldn't
you look at it in that light ?"

" I dare say Mrs. March could," the editor assented.
" I don't believe she could be brought to regard it as
a pleasure on any other terms."

" Of course not," said Fulkerson. " If you won't
take a year, take three months, and call it a Sabbati-

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

cal summer; but go, anyway. You can make up half
a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your
ways so well that you needn't think about Every Other
Week from the time you start till the time you try to
bribe the customs inspector when you get back. I can
take a hack at the editing myself, if Tom's inspiration
gives out, and put a little of my advertising fire into
the thing.'' He laid his hand on the shoulder of the
young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed and
shook him in the liking there was between them. " Now
you go, March ! Mrs. Fulkerson feels just as I do about
it; we had our outing last year, and we want Mrs.
March and you to have yours. You let me go down
and engage your passage, and — "

"No, no!" the editor rebelled. "I'll think about
it " ; but, as he turned to the work he was so fond of
and so weary of, he tried not to think of the question
again till he closed his desk in the afternoon and start-
ed to walk home ; the doctor had said he ought to walk,
and he did so, though he longed to ride, and looked
wistfully at the passing cars.

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said ; but,
if it was a rut, it was a support, too ; it kept him from
wobbling. She always talked as if the flowery fields of
youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been
going so long, and he had but to step aside from it to
be among the butterflies and buttercups again ; he some-
times indulged this illusion himself in a certain ironi-
cal spirit which caressed while it mocked the notion.
They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they
were ever to find it again, was to be looked for in Eu-
rope, where they met when they were young, and they
had never been quite without the hope of going back
there, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen
the time when they could do so; they were dreamers,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

but, as they recognized, even dreaming is not free from
care ; and in his dream March had been obliged to work
pretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced
to forego the distinctly literary ambition with which he
had started in life because he had their conmion liv-
ing to make, and he conld not make it by writing grace-
ful verse, or even graceful prose. He had been many
years in a sufficiently distasteful business, and he had
lost any thought of leaving it when it left him, perhaps
because his hold on it had always been rather lax, and
he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it. At
any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at
Boston by a subordinate in his office, and, though ho
was at the same time oflFered a place of nominal credit
in the employ of the company, he was able to decline it
in grace of a chance which united the charm of con-
genial work with the solid advantage of a better salary
than he had been getting for work he hated. It was an
incredible chance, but it was rendered appreciably real
by the necessity it involved that they should leave Bos-
ton, where they had lived all their married life, where
Mrs. March as well as their children was born, and
where all their tender and familiar ties were, and come
to New York, where the literary enterprise which form-
ed his chance was to be founded.

It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his busi-
ness partner had imagined in such leisure as the man-
agement of a newspaper syndicate afforded him, and
had always thought of getting March to edit. The
magazine which is also a book has since been realized
elsewhere on more or less prosperous terms, but not for
any long period, and Every Other Week was apparent-
ly the only periodical of the kind conditioned for sur-
vival. It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and
it had the instant favor of a popular mood, which has

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

since changed, but whicH did not change so soon that
the magazine had not time to establish itself in a wide
acceptance. It was now no longer a novelty, it was no
longer in the maiden blush of its first success, but it
had entered upon its second youth with the reasonable
hope of many years of prosperity before it In fact,
it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and
the Marches had the conditions, almost dismayingly per-
fect, in which they had often promised themselves to go
and be young again in Europe, when they rebelled at
finding themselves elderly in America. Their daughter
was married, and so very much to her mother's mind
that she did not worry about her, even though she lived
so far away as Chicago, still a wild frontier town to her
Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as he left
college, had taken hold on Every Other WeeTc, under
his father's instruction, with a zeal and intelligence
which won him Fulkerson's praise as a chip of the old
block. These two liked each other, and worked into
each other's hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson
and March had ever done. It amused the father to see
his son offering Fulkerson the same deference which
the Business End paid to seniority in March himself;
but, in fact, Eulkerson's forehead was getting, as he
said, more intellectual every day; and the years were
pushing them all along together.

Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day
he fell down in it. He had a long sickness, and when
he was well of it he was so slow in getting his grip
of work again that he was sometimes deeply discour-
aged. His wife shared his depression, whether he show-
ed or whether he hid it, and when the doctor advised
his going abroad she abetted the doctor with all the
strength of a woman's hygienic intuitions. March him-
self willingly consented, at first ; but, as soon as he got

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

strength for his work, he began to temporize and to de-
mur. He said that he believed it would do him just as
much good to go to Saratoga, where they always had
such a good time, as to go to Carlsbad ; and Mrs. March
had been obliged several times to leave him to his own
undoing; she always took him more vigorously in hand
afterward.

When he got home from the Et^ery Other Week of-
fice, the afternoon of that talk with the Business End,
he wanted to laugh with his wife at Fulkerson^s notion
of a Sabbatical year. She did not think it was so very
droll ; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she
had now the authority of Holy Writ for forcing him
abroad; she found no relish of absurdity in the idea
that it was his duty to take this rest which had been
his right before.

He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been
working to the surface of his thought. " We could call
it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round to all the
old places, and see them in the reflected light of the
past."

"Oh, we could r^ she responded, passionately; and
he had now the delicate responsibility of persuading
her that he was joking.

He could think of nothing better than a return to
Fulkerson^s absurdity. " It would be our Silver Wed-
ding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical year
— a good deal after date. But I suppose that would
make it all the more silvery."

She faltered in her elation. " DidnH you say a Sab-
batical year yourself ?" she demanded.

" Fulkerson said it ; but it was a figurative oxpres-
sion."

" And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a

figurative expression, too !"

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

" It was a notion that tempted me ; I thought you
would enjoy it Don't you suppose I should be glad,
too, if we could go over, and find ourselves just as we
were when we first met there ?"

"No; I don't believe now that you care anything
about it."

"Well, it couldn't be done, anyway; so that doesn't
matter."

" It could be done, if you were a mind to think so.
And it would be the greatest inspiration to you. You
are always longing for some chance to do original work,
to get away from your editing, but you've let the time
slip by without really trying to do anything; I don't
call those little studies of yours in the magazine any-
thing ; and now you won't take the chance that's almost
forcing itself upon you. Ybu could write an original
book of the nicest kind ; mix up travel and fiction ; get
some love in."

" Oh, that's the stalest kind of thing!"

" Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new
point of view. You could look at it as a sort of
dispassionate witness, and treat it himiorously — of
course it is ridiculous — and do something entirely
fresh."

" It wouldn't work. It would be carrying water on
both shoulders. The fiction would kill the travel, the
travel would kill the fiction; the love and the humor
wouldn't mingle any more than oil and vinegar.^'

" Well, and what is better than a salad ?"

" But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing
to put it on." She was silent, and he yielded to an-
other fancy. "We might imagine coming upon our
former selves over there, and travelling round with them
— a wedding journey en partie carree.^^

" Something like that. I call it a very poetical idea,"

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THEIE SILVEE WEDDING JOURNEY

she said, with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting
another ambush.

" It isnH so bad," he admitted. " How young we
were in those days !"

" Too young to know what a good time we were hav-
ing," she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect.
" I don^t feel as if I really saw Europe then ; I was too
inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple. I would like
to go, just to make sure that I had been." He was
smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred
to him that amused him, and she demanded, "What

isitr

" Nothing. I was wishing we could go in the con-
sciousness of people who actually hadn't been before —
carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in
the old, simple-hearted American way."

She shook her head. " You couldn't ! They've all
been!"

"All but about sixty or seventy millions," said
March.

" Well, those are just the millions you don't know
and couldn't imagine."

" Fm not so sure of that."

" And even if you could imagine them, you couldn't
make them interesting. All the interesting ones have
been, anyway."

" Some of the uninteresting ones, too. I used to meet
some of that sort over there. I believe I would rather
chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn't been."

" Then why not do it ? I know you could get some-
thing out of it."

" It might be a good thing," he mused, " to take a
couple who had passed their whole life here in New
York, too poor and too busy ever to go, and had a per-
fect famine for Europe all the time. I could have them

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

She answered to all, No; he had made her realize the
horror of it so much that she was glad to give it up.
She gave it up, with the best feeling; all that she would
ask of him was that he should never mention Europe
to her again. She could imagine how much he disliked
to go, if such a ship as the Colmannia did not make him
want to go.

At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not
used her very well. He had kindled her fancy with
those notions of a Sabbatical year and a Silver Wedding
Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he
had persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell
her afterward that he would not go abroad on any ac-
count. It was by a psychological juggle which some
men will imderstand that he allowed himself the next
day to get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steam-
ship office ; he also got a plan of the ship, showing the
most available state-rooms, so that they might be able
to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the
facts.

From this time their decision to go was none the less
explicit because so perfectly tacit.

They began to amass maps and guides. She got a
Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for the
Continent, which was never of the least use there, but
was for the present a mine of unavailable information.
He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his Ger-
man. He used to read German when he was a boy,
with a young enthusiasm for its romantic poetry, and
now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he
held imaginary conversations with a barber, a boot-
maker, and a banker, and tried to taste the joy which
he had not known in the language of those poets for a
whole generation. He perceived, of course, that unless
the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

in terms which the author of the phrase-book directed
them to use, he should not get on with them beyond his
first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his
pleasure in it In fact, it was with a tender emotion
that he realized how little the world, which had changed
in everything else so greatly, had changed in its ideal
of a phrase-book.

Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to
the time and place for it ; and addressed herself to the
immediate business of ascertaining the respective merits
of the Colmannia and Norumbia. She carried on her
researches solely among persons of her own sex ; its ex-
periences were alone of that positive character which
brings conviction, and she valued them equally at first
or second hand. She heard of ladies who would not
cross in any boat but the Colmannia^ and who waited
for months to get a room on her ; she talked with ladies
who said that nothing would induce them to cross in
her. There were ladies who said she had twice the mo-
tion that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her
twin screws was frightful ; it always was on those twin-
screw boats, and it did not affect their testimony with
Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screw boat,
too. It was repeated to her in the third or fourth de-
gree of hearsay that the discipline on the Colmannia
was as perfect as that on the Cunarders; ladies whose
friends had tried every line assured her that the table
of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the
French boats. To the best of the belief of lady wit-
nesses still living who had friends on board, the Col-
mannia had once got aground, and the Norumbia had
once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it
might be the Colmannia; they promised to ask and let
her know. Their lightest word availed with her against
the most solemn assurances of their husbands, fathers,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but in
navigation were not to be trusted ; they would say any-
thing from a reckless and culpable optimism. She
obliged March, all the same, to ask among them, but
she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came
home saying that one man had told him you could have
played croquet on the deck of the Colmannia the whole
way over when he crossed, and another that he never
saw the racks on in three passages he had made in the
Norumbia.

The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of
the Norumbia, but when they went another Sunday to
Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March liked her so
much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly
wait for Monday to come; she felt sure all the good
rooms on the Colmannia would be gone before they
could engage one.

From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left
in town so late in the season, she knew that the only
place on any steamer where your room ought to be
was probably just where they could not get it. If you
went too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and peo-
ple tramping up and down on the promenade under
your window kept you awake the whole night; if you
went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump
in your head the whole way over. If you went too far
forward, you got the pitching ; if you went aft, on the
kitchen side, you got the smell of the cooking. The
only place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon
on the south side of the ship ; it was smooth there, and
it was quiet, and you had the sun in your window all
the way over. He asked her if he must take their room
there or nowhere, and she answered that he must do his
best, but that she would not be satisfied with any other
place.

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

In his despair he went down to the steamer office
and took a room which one of the clerks said was the
best. When he got home, it appeared from reference
to the ship's plan that it was the very room his wife
had wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as
if he had used a wisdom beyond his sex in getting it.

He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor
when a belated lady came with her husband for an even-
ing call, before going into the country. At sight of the
plans of steamers on the Marches' table, she expressed
the greatest wonder and delight that they were going to
Europe. They had supposed everybody knew it by this
time, but she said she had not heard a word of it ; and
she went on with some felicitations which March found
rather unduly filial. In getting a little past the prime
of life he did not like to be used with too great con-
sideration of his vears, and he did not think that he and
his wife were so old that they need to be treated as if
they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heap-
ed with all sorts of impertinent prophecies of their en-
joying it so much and being so much the better for the
little outing! Under his breath, he confounded this
lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to
let her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic boat, be-
cause the Germans were always so careful of you. She
made her husband agree wnth her, and it came out that
he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and
the Norumbia. He volunteered to say that the Colman-
nia was a capital sea-boat; she did not have her nose
under water all the time; she was steady as a rock;
and the captain and the kitchen were simply out of
sight ; some people did call her unlucky.

" Unlucky V Mrs. March echoed, faintly. " Why do
they call her unlucky ?'*

" Oh, I don't know. People will say anything about

a 15

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

any boat. You know she broke her shaft once, and once
she got caught in the ice/'

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition
of people, and she parted gayly with this overgood young
couple. As soon as they were gone, March knew that
she would say : " You must change that ticket, my dear.
We will go in the Norumhia.^^

" Suppose I can't get as good a room on the No-
rumhiaf"

" Then we must stay."

In the morning, after a night so bad that it was
worse than no night at all, she said she would go to
the steamship office with him and question them up
about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard
she was called an imlucky boat ; they knew of nothing
disastrous in her history. They were so frank and so
full in their denials, and so kindly patient of Mrs.
March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying
conviction of their insincerity to her. At the end she
asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the
clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his pas-
senger list with a shaking head. He was afraid there
was nothing they would like.

" But we would take anything/^ she entreated, and
March smiled to think of his innocence in supposing
for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.

" We merely want the best," he put in. " One flight
up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and
a place for fire on rainy days."

They must be used to a good deal of American jok-
ing which they do not understand in the foreign steam-
ship offices. The clerk turned unsmilingly to one of
his superiors and asked him some question in Gferman
which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed
no part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

or a banker. A brief drama followed, and then the
clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbia
and said it had just been given up, and they could have
it if they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of their
room on the Colmannia; it was within one of being the
same number. It was so providential, if it was provi-
dential at all, that they were both humbly silent a mo-
ment; even Mrs. March was silent. In this supreme
moment she would not prompt her husband by a word,
a glance, and it was from his own free will that he said,
" We will take it."

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's
will is never free ; and this may have been an instance
of pure determinism from all the events before it No
event that followed affected it, though the day after they
had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that
she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the
month of August. He felt obliged to impart the fact
to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or
against the ship, and confounded him more by her rea-
son than by all her previous unreason. Reason is what
a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps be-
cause he finds it so seldom in men.

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DtJBiNG nearly the whole month that now passed be-
fore the date of sailing it seemed to March that in some
familiar aspects New York had never been so interest-
ing. He had not easily reconciled himself to the place
after his many years of Boston ; but h© had got used to
the ugly grandeur, to the noise and the rush, and he
had divined more and more the careless good -nature
and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, un-
gainly metropolis. There were happy moments when
he felt a poetry unintentional and unconscious in it,
and he thought there was no point more favorable for
the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they
had a flat. Their windpws looked down into its tree-
tops, and across them to the tnmcated towers of St.
George's, and to the plain red -brick, white - trimmed
front of the Friends' Meeting House ; he came and went
between his dwelling and his office through the two
places that form the square, and after dinner his wife
and he had a habit of finding seats by one of the
fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and
mothers of the hybrid East Side children swarming
there at play. The elders read their English or Ital-
ian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or
merely sat still and stared away the day's fatigue ; while
the little ones raced in and out among them, crying and
laughing, quarrelling and kissing. Sometimes a mother
darted forward and caught her child from the brink of

the basin ; another taught hers to walk, holding it tight-

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

ly up behind by its short skirts ; another publicly nursed
her baby to sleep.

While they still dreamed, but never thought, of go-
ing to Europe, the Marches often said how European
all this was; if these women had brought their knit-
ting or sewing it would have been quite European;
but as soon as they had decided to go, it all began to
seem poignantly American. In like manner, before the
conditions of their exile changed, and they still pined
for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable il-
lusion of it by dining now and then at an Austrian
restaurant in Union Square ; but later, when they began
to be homesick for the American scenes they had not
yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strict-
ly New York sunset they were bowed out into.

The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that
May in Union Square. They were the color of the red
stripes in the American flag, and when they were seen
through the delirious architecture of the Broadway
side, or down the perspective of the cross-streets, where
the elevated trains silhouetted themselves against their
pink, they imparted a feeling of pervasive American-
ism in which all impression of alien savors and civili-
ties was lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Ho-
boken, and burned for hours against the west, in the
lurid crimson tones of a conflagration as memorably
and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.

The weather for nearly the whole month was of a
mood familiar enough in our early summer, and it was
this which gave the sunsets their vitreous pink. A
thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in
the long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter
flannels. But at last a hot wave was telegraphed from
the West, and the week before the Norumbia sailed was
an anguish of burning days and breathless nights, which

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape,
and made the exiles of two continents long for the sea,
with no care for either shore.

Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at
dawn because they had scarcely lain down, and March
crept out into the square for a last breath of its morn-
ing air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone ;
he had broken with habit, and he wished to put all
traces of the past out of sight. But this was curiously
like all other early mornings in his consciousness, and
he could not alienate himself from the wonted environ-
ment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle
speculation with the familiar policeman about a stray
parrot in the top of one of the trees, where it screamed
and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung. Then
he went carelessly in-doors again as if he were secure
of reading the reporter's story of it in that next day's
paper which he should not see.

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted
through the breakfast, which was like other break-
fasts in the place they would be leaving in sunmier
shrouds just as they always left it at the end of Jime.
The illusion was even heightened by the fact that their
son was to be in the apartment all summer, and it would
not be so much shut up as usual. The heavy tnmks
had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon be-
fore, and they had only themselves and their state-room
baggage to transport to Hoboken ; they came down to a
carriage sent from a neighboring livery - stable, and
exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by
name.

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of liv-
ing in New York that you could drive to the steam-
er and start for Europe as if you were starting for
'Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage

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THEIK SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

now, but somehow it was not the consolation he had
expected. He knew, of course, that if they had been
coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the No-
rumbia, they would probably have gone on board the
night before, and sweltered through its heat among
the strange smells and noises of the dock and wharf,
instead of breakfasting at their own table and smooth-
ly bowling down the asphalt onto the ferry - boat, and
so to the very foot of the gangway at the ship's side,
all in the cool of the early morning. But though he
had now the cool of the early morning on these condi-
tions, there was by no means enough of it. The sun
was already burning the life out of the air, with the
threat of another day of the terrible heat that had pre-
vailed for a week past ; and that last breakfast at home
had not been gay, though it had been lively, in a fash-
ion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son
that she did not want, him to come and see them off.
Of her daughter's coming all the way from Chicago
there was no question, and she reasoned that if he did
not come to say good-bye on board it would be the same
as if they were not going.

" Don't you want to go ?" March asked, with an ob-
scure resentment

" I don't want to seem to go," she said, with the calm
of those who have logic on their side.

As she drove away with her husband she was not so
sure of her satisfaction in the feint she had arranged,
though when she saw the ghastly partings of people on
board she was glad she had not allowed her son to come.
She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed
to the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in
the crowd that choked the saloons and promenades and
passages and stairways and landings, she said it more
than once to her husband.

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She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses
of farewell with friends who had come to see them off,
as they stood withdrawn in such refuges as the ship's
architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed and
twirled about by the surging throng when they got in
its way. She pitied these in their affliction, which she
perceived that they could not lighten or shorten, but
she had no patience with the young girls, who broke
into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain
young men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they
made the young men see them ; and then stretched their
hands to them and stood screaming and shouting to
them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some
girls, of those whom no one had come to bid good-bye,
made themselves merry, or at least noisy, by rushing off
to the dining-room and looking at the cards on the
bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one
had sent them flowers. Others whom young men had
brought bunches of violets hid their noses in them, and
dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and card-cases,
and thanked the young men for picking them up.
Others had got places in the music-room, and sat there
with open boxes of long - stemmed roses in their laps,
and talked up into the faces of the men, with becoming
lifts and slants of their eyes and chins. In the midst
of the turmoil children struggled against people's feet
and knees, and bewildered mothers flew at the ship's
officers and battered them with questions alien to their
respective functions as they amiably stifled about in
their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats,
were placidly smearing it with paint at that last mo-
ment; the bulwarks w^ere thickly set with the heads
and arms of passengers who were making signs to

friends on shore, or calling messages to them that lost

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themselves in louder noises midway. Some of the
women in the steerage were crying ; they were probably
not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin
passengers, or even for their health ; on the wharf be-
low March saw the face of one young girl twisted with
weeping, and he wished he had not seen it. He turned
from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was
laughing at his shoulder. He said that he had to come
down with a good-bye letter from his sister, which he
made an excuse for following them ; but he had always
meant to see them off, he owned. The letter had just
come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them
that she had sent another good-bye letter with some
flowers on board. Mrs. March scolded at them both,
but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress
of parting which he thought he had put from him,
March went on taking note, as with alien senses, of
the scene before him, while they all talked on together
and repeated the nothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet -root sugar rose from the far-
branching sheds where some freight steamers of the
line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically with the
noise which came up from the wharf next to the No-
rumbia. The mass of spectators deepened and dimmed
away into the shadow of the roofs, and along their
front came files of carriages and trucks and cart^,
and discharged the arriving passengers and their
baggage, and were lost in the crowd, which they pene-
trated like slow currents, becoming clogged and ar-
rested from time to time, and then beginning to move
again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-
draped galleries leading, fore and aft, into the ship.
Bareheaded, blue - jacketed, brass - buttoned stewards

dodged skilfully in and out among them with their

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

hand-bags, hold-alls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks,
and ran before them into, the different depths and
heights where they hid these burdens, and then ran
back for more. Some of the passengers followed them
and made sure that their things were put in the right
places ; most of them remained wedged among the ear-
lier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out of the doors
of the promenades.

The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge
blocks from the wharf, with a loud clucking of the
tackle, and sank into the open maw of the ship, mo-
mently gathering herself for her long race seaward,
with harsh hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There
was no apparent reason why it should all or any of it
end, but there came a moment when there began to
be warnings that were almost threats of the end. The
ship^s whistle sounded, as if marking a certain inter-
val; and Mrs. March humbly entreated, sternly com-
manded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to
Europe. They disputed whether that was the last sig-
nal or not; she was sure it was, and she appealed to
March, who was moved against his reason. He affected
to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last
charges about Every Other Week.

Some people now intermitted their leave-taking; but
the arriving passengers only arrived more rapidly at the
gangways; the bulks of baggage swung more swiftly
into the air. A bell rang, and there rose women's cries,
" Oh, that is the shore-bell !" and men's protests, " It
is only the first bell!" More and more began to de-
scend the gangways, fore and aft, and soon outnum-
bered those who were coming aboard.

March tried not to be nervous about his son's lin-
gering; he was ashamed of his anxiety; but he said
in a low voice, " Better be off, Tom."

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His mother now said she did not care if Tom were
really carried to Europe ; and at last he said, Well, he
guessed he must go ashore, as if there had been no ques-
tion of that before; and then she clung to him and
would not let him go ; but she acquired merit with her-
self at last by pushing him into the gangway with her
own hands : he nodded and waved his hat from its foot,
and mixed with the crowd.

Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard,
and the sailors began to imdo the lashings of the gang-
ways from the ship's side; files of men on the wharf
laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their
approach looked up for the signal to come aboard ; and
in vivid pantomime forbade some belated leave-takers
to ascend. These stood aside, exchanging bows and
grins with the friends whom they could not reach;
they all tried to make one another hear some last words.
The moment came when the saloon gangway was de-
tached; then it was pulled ashore, and the section of
the bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be un-
locked on this side of the world. An indefinable im-
pulse conmiunicated itself to the steamer : while it still
seemed motionless it moved. The thick spread of faces
on the wharf, which had looked at times like some sort
of strange flowers in a level field, broke into a uni-
versal tremor, and the air above them was filled with
hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds
rising from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son's face ; they

believed that they did ; but they decided that they had

not seen him, and his mother said that she was glad ; it

would only have made it harder to bear, though she was

glad he had come over to say good-bye: it had seemed so

unnatural that he should not, when everybody else was

saying good-bye.

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On the wharf color was now taking the place of
form; the scene ceased to have the effect of an in-
stantaneous photograph; it was like an impressionistic
study* As the ship swung free of the shed and got
into the stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain
moment, all was still New York, all was even Hobo-
ken; then amid the grotesque and monstrous shows of
the architecture on either shore March felt himself at
sea and on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were al-
ready making with the deck-steward about their steamer
chairs, which they all wanted put in the best places,
and March, with a certain heartache, was involuntarily
verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his
native shores, while still in full sight of them, when
he suddenly reverted to them, and as it were landed on
them again in an incident that held him breathless.
A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly
abroad, came flying down the promenade from the steer-
age. "Capitan! Capitan! There is a woman P^ he
shouted in nondescript English. " She must go hout !
She must go houtP^ Some vital fact imparted itself
to the ship's command and seemed to penetrate to the
ship's heart ; she stopped, as if with a sort of majestic
relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder
to it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a
baby in her arms, sprawled safely dovm its rungs to
the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved seaward
again.

" What is it? Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded
of March's share of their common ignorance. A young
fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the tragic note
in her voice, and explained that the woman had left
three little children locked up in her tenement while
she came to bid some friends on board good-bye.

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He passed on, and Mrs. March said, " What a charm-
ing face he had !" even before she began to wreak upon
that wretched mother the overwrought sympathy which
makes good women desire the punishment of people
who have escaped danger. She would not hear any
excuse for her. " Her children oughtn't to have been
out of her mind for an instant."

" Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the
pilot ?" March asked.

She started from him. " Oh, was I really beginning
to forget them ?"

In the saloon where people were scattered about writ-
ing pilot's letters she made him join her in an impas-
sioned epistle of farewell, which once more left none
of the nothings unsaid that they had many times re-
iterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for
fear it would not stick, and she had an agonizing mo-
ment of doubt whether it ought not to be a Grerman
stamp ; she was not pacified till the steward in charge
of the mail decided.

" I shouldn't have forgiven myself," March said, " if
we hadn't let Tom know that twenty minutes after he
left us we were still alive and well."

" It's to Bella, too," she reasoned.

He found her making their state-room look homelike
with their familiar things when he came with their
daughter's steamer letter and the flowers and fruit she
had sent. She said. Very well, they would all keep,
and went on with her unpacking. He asked her if she
did not think these home things made it rather ghastly,
and she said if he kept on in that way she should cer-
tainly go back on the pilot-boat. He perceived that her
nerves were spent. He had resisted the impulse to an
ill - timed joke about the life - preservers under their
berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn, wavering

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer
down their corridor.

In one of the many visits to the steamship office
which his wife's anxieties obliged him to make, March
had discussed the question of seats in the dining-saloon.
At first he had his ambition for the captain's table, but
they convinced him more easily than he afterward con-
vinced Mrs. March that the captain's table had become
a superstition of the past, and conferred no special hon-
or. It proved in the event that the captain of the No-
nimbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon
among the passengers who paid least for their rooms.
But while the Marches were still in their ignorance of
this, they decided to get what adventure they could out
of letting the head steward put them where he liked,
and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity
to see what he had done for them.

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge
saloon; through the oval openings in the centre they
looked down into the lower saloon and up into the
music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters. The
tables were brightened with the bouquets and the floral
designs of ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to tho
lady passengers, and at one time the Marches thought
they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized
to the last detail in blue and white violets. The ports
of the saloon were open, and showed the level sea ; the
ship rode with no motion except the tremor from her
screws. The sound of talking and laughing rose with
the clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crock-
ery; the homely smell of the coffee and steak and fish
mixed with the spice of the roses and carnations; the
stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish
joy of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair.
When the head steward turned out the swivel-chairs

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

where they were to sit they both made an inclination
toward the people already at table, as if it had been a
company at some far-forgotten table d'hote in the later
sixties. The head steward seemed to understand as well
as speak English, but the table-stewards had only an ef-
fect of English, which they eked out with " Bleace !"
for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance,
as the equivalent of their native '^ Bitte!" Otherwise
there was no reason to suppose that they did not speak
German, which was the language of a good half of the
passengers. The stewards looked English, however, in
conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of for-
eign seafaring people, and that went a good way toward
making them intelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance,
made it so tentative that if it should meet no response
he could feel that it had been nothing more than a
forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down.
He need not really have taken this precaution; those
whose eyes he caught more or less nodded in return.
A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the
place on the left of the lady in the sofa seat under the
port, bowed with almost magisterial gravity, and made
the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were his mother
and understood him. March decided that she had been
some time a widow; and he easily divined that the
young couple on her right had been so little time hus-
band and wife that they would rather not have it kno^vn.
Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first
think so good-looking as she proved later to be, though
she had at once a pretty nose, with a slight upward
slant at the point, long eyes under fallen lashes, a
straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which
perhaps the exigencies of breakfasting did not allow
all its characteristic charm. She had what Mrs. March

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thought interesting hair, of a dull black, roughly rolled
away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not
particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not
looking so well as she might if she had chosen. The
elderly man on her right, it was easy to see, was her
father ; they had a family likeness, though his fair hair,
now ashen with age, was so different from hers. He
wore his beard cut in the fashion of the Second Em-
pire, with a Louis Napoleonic mustache, imperial, and
chin tuft; his neat head was cropped close, and there
was something Gallic in its effect and something re-
motely military: he had blue eyes, really less severe
than he meant, though he frowned a good deal, and
managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as
if challenging a potential disagreement with his opin-
ions.

The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of
the table, was of the humorous, subironical American
expression, and a smile at the comer of his kindly
mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once
questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced
at them. He responded to March's bow almost as
decidedly as the nice boy, whose mother he confront-
ed at the other end of the table, and with his come-
ly bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid
slightness. She was brilliantly dark, behind the gleam
of the gold -rimmed glasses perched on her pretty
nose.

If the talk had been general before the Marches
came, it did not at once renew itself in that form.
Nothing was said while they were having their first
struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the or-
der as if to show how fully they had misunderstood it.
The gentleman at the head of the table intervened at
last, and then, " I'm obliged to you,'' March said " for

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yoTir German. I left mine in a phrase-book in my other
coat-pocket.'^

" Oh, I wasn't speaking German," said the other.
" It was merely their kind of English."

The company were in the excitement of a novel situa-
tion which disposes people to acquaintance, and this
exchange of small pleasantries made every one laugh,
except the father and daughter ; but they had the effect
of being tacitly amused.

The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March,
" You may not get what you ordered, but it will be
good."

" Even if you don't know what it is !" said the young
bride, and then blushed, as if she had been too bold.

Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride for
it, and she asked, " Have you ever been on one of these
German boats before ? They seem very comfortable."

" Oh, dear, no! we've never been on any boat before."
She made a little petted mouth of deprecation, and add-
ed, simple-heartedly, " My husband was going out on
business, and. he thought he might as well take me
along."

The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by
this, and said he did not see why they should not make
it a pleasure-trip, too. They put themselves in a posi-
tion to be patronized by their deference, and in the
pauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of
the table, March heard his wife abusing their inex-
perience to be unsparingly instructive about European
travel. He wondered whether she would be afraid to
own that it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed
the ocean ; though that might seem recent to people who
had never crossed at all.

They listened with respect as she boasted in what an
anguish of wisdom she had decided between the Col-
3 31

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mannia and the Norumbia. The wife said she did not
know there was such a difference in steamers, but when
Mrs. March perfervidly assured her that there was all
the difference in the world, she submitted, and said she
supposed she ought to be thankful that they had hit
upon the right one. They had telegraphed for berths
and taken what was given them ; their room seemed to
be very nice.

" Oh," said Mrs. March, and her husband knew that
she was saying it to reconcile them to the inevitable,
"aH the rooms on the Norumbia are nice. The only
difference is that if they are on the south side you have
the sun."

" I'm not sure which is the south side," said the
bride. " We seem to have been going west ever since
we started, and I feel as if we should reach home in
the morning if we had a good night. Is the ocean al-
ways so smooth as this ?"

" Oh, dear, no !" said Mrs. March. " It's never so
smooth as this," and she began to be outrageously au-
thoritative about the ocean weather. She ended by de-
claring that the June passages were always good, and
that if the ship kept a southerly course they would have
no fogs and no icebergs. She looked round, and caught
her husband's eye. " What is it ? have I been bragging?
Well, you imderstand," she added to the bride, " IVe
only been over once, a great while ago, and I don't
really know anything about it," and they laughed to-
gether. " But I talked so much with people after we
decided to go that I feel as if I had been a hundred
times."

" I know," said the other lady, with caressing intel-
ligence. " That is just the way with — ^" She stopped,
and looked at the young man whom the head steward

was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March.

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He came forward, stufimg his cap into the pocket of
his blue serge sack, and smiled down on the company
with such happiness in his gay eyes that March won-
dered what chance at this late day could have given
any himian creature his content so absolute, and what
calamity could be lurking round the corner to take it
out of him. The new-comer looked at March as if ho
knew him, and March saw at a second glance that he
was the young fellow who had told him about the mother
put off after the start. He asked him whether there was
any change in the weather yet outside, and he answered
eagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the
mere sound of words were a favor done him, that their
ship had just spoken one of the big Hanseatic mail-
boats, and she had signalled back that she had met ice ;
so that they would probably keep a southerly course,
and not have it cooler till they were off the Banks.

The mother of the boy said, " I thought we must be
off the Banks when I came out of my room, but it was
only the electric fan at the foot of the stairs.^'

" That was what / thought," said Mrs. March. " I
almost sent my husband back for my shawl!" Both
the ladies laughed and liked each other for their com-
mon experience.

The gentleman at the head of the table said, " They
ought to have fans going there by that pillar, or else
close the ports. They only let in heat."

They easily conformed to the American convention
of jocosity in their talk ; it perhaps no more represents
the individual mood than the convention of dulness
among other people; but it seemed to make the young
man feel at home.

" Why, do you think it's uncomfortably warm ?" he
asked, from what March perceived to be a meteorology
of his own. He laughed and added, " It is pretty sum-

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merlike," as if he had not thought of it before. He
talked of the big mail-boat, and said he would like to
cross on such a boat as that, and then he glanced at the
possible advantage of having your own steam-yacht like
the one which he said they had just passed, so near
that you could see what a good time the people were
having on board. He began to speak to the Marches ;
his talk spread to the young couple across the table ; it
visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she
might ignore without apparent rejection, and without
really avoiding the boy, it glanced off toward the father
and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest with the gentle-
man at the head of the table.

It was not that the father and daughter had slight-
ed his overture, if it was so much as that, but that they
were tacitly preoccupied, or were of some philosophy
concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not suf-
fer them, for the present at least, to share in the com-
mon friendliness. This is an attitude sometimes pro-
duced in people by a sense of just, or even unjust, su-
periority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes by
transient annoyance. The cause was not so deep-seated
but Mrs. March, before she rose from her place, be-
lieved that she had detected a slant of the young lady's
eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man;
and she leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a
matter where all logical steps are impertinent. She did
not announce her arrival at this point till the young
man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon,
and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under
the table.

He went away with her thanks, and then she said

to her husband, " Well, he's perfectly charming, and

I don't wonder she's taken with him ; that kind of cold

girl would be, though I'm not sure that she is cold.

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She's interesting, and you could see that he thought so,
the more he looked at her ; I could see him looking at
her from the very first instant; he couldn't keep his
eyes ofF her; she piqued his curiosity, and made him
wonder about her."

" Now, look here, Isabel ! This won't do. I can
stand a good deal, but I sat between you and that yoimg
fellow, and you couldn't tell whether he was looking at
that girl or not."

" I could ! I could tell by the expression of her face."

" Oh, well ! If it's gone as far as that with you, I
give it up. When are you going to have them mar-
ried?"

" Nonsense ! I want you to find out who all those
people are. How are you going to do it ?"

" Perhaps the passenger list will say," he suggested.

The list did not say of itself, but with the help of
the head steward's diagram it said that the gentleman
at the head of the table was Mr. R. M. Kenby; the
father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and
Miss Triscoe ; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs. Lef-
fers; the mother and her son were Mrs. Adding and
Mr. Rosewell Adding; the young man who came in
last was Mr. L. J. Bumamy. March carried the list,
with these names carefully checked and rearranged on
a neat plan of the table, to his wife in her steamer
chair, and left her to make out the history and the
character of the people from it. In this sort of con-
jecture long experience had taught him his futility,
and he strolled up and down and looked at the life
about him with no wish to peijetrate it deeply.

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left.
Some fishing-boats flickered off the shore; they met a
few sail, and left more behind; but already, and so
near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious

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solitude of the ocean was beginning. There was no
swell ; the sea lay quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles
on its surface, and the sun flamed down upon it from a
sky without a cloud. With the light fair wind, there
was no resistance in the sultry air ; the thin, dun smoke
from the smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling
veil.

The promenades were as uncomfortably crowded as
the sidewalk of Fourteenth Street on a simimer's day,
and showed much the social average of a New York
shopping thoroughfare. Distinction is something that
does not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and
at sea it is still more retrusive. A certain democracy
of looks and clothes was the most notable thing to March
in the apathetic groups and detached figures. His criti-
cism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much
personal appeal as he imagined in some of the second-
cabin passengers whom he saw across their barrier ; they
had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he could
wonder if they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he
had seen certain people coming on board who looked
liked swells ; but they had now either retired from the
crowd, or they had already conformed to the prevail-
ing type. It was very well as a type ; he was of it him-
self; but he wished that beauty as well as distinction
had not been so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere
as he once did. It might be that he saw life more
truly than when he was young, and that his glasses
were better than his eyes had been; but there were
analogies that forbade his thinking so, and he some-
times had his misgivings that the trouble was with
his glasses. He made what he could of a pretty girl
who had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from
flirtation, and was luring her fellow-passengers from

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under her sailor hat. She had already attached one
of them ; and she was looking out for more. She kept
moving herself from the waist up, as if she worked
there on a pivot, showing now this side and now that
side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had se-
cured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light
as she turned.

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense
of impersonal pleasure in it as complete through his
years as if he were already a disembodied spirit, the
pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he joined
the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expecta-
tion of seeing another distracted mother put off; but
it was only the pilot leaving the ship. He was climb-
ing down the ladder which hung over the boat, rising
and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in
her held her from the ship's side with their oars; in
the offing lay the white steam-yacht which now replaces
the picturesque pilot-sloop of other times. The No-
rujnhia's screws turned again under half a head of
steam; the pilot dropped from the last rung of the
ladder into the boat, and caught the bundle of letters
tossed after him. Then his men let go the line that
was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer's
departure was finally closed. It had been dramatically
heightened perhaps by her final impatience to be off
at some added risks to the pilot and his men, but not
painfully so, and March smiled to think how men whose
lives are full of dangerous chances seem always to take
as many of them as they can.

He heard a girl's fresh voice saying at his shoulder,
"Well, now we are off; and I suppose you're glad,
papa !"

" I'm glad we're not taking the pilot on, at least,"
answered the elderly man whom the girl had spoken

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THEIK SILVER WEDDING JOUENET

to; and March turned to see the father and daughter
whose reticence at the breakfast - table had interested
him. He wondered that he had left her out of the ac-
count in estimating the beauty of the ship's passengers :
he saw now that she was not only extremely pretty, but
as she moved away she was very graceful ; she even had
distinction. He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at
the same time of reproach in her voice, when she spoke,
and a tone of defiance and not very successful denial in
her father's; and he went back with these impressions
to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the
ship had stopped.

She had not noticed the ship's stopping, in her study
of the passenger list, and she did not care for the pilot's
leaving; but she seemed to think his having overheard
those words of the father and daughter an event of
prime importance. With a woman's willingness to
adapt the means to the end she suggested that he should
follow them up and try to overhear something more;
she only partially realized the infamy of her suggestion
when he laughed in scornful refusal.

" Of course I don't want you to eavesdrop, but I
do want you to find out about them. And about Mr.
Bumamy, too. I can wait, about the others, or man-
age for myself, but these are driving me to distraction.
Now, will you ?"

He said he would do anything he could with honor,
and at one of the earliest turns he made on the other
side of the ship he was smilingly halted by Mr. Bur-
namy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if ho
were not Mr. March of Every Other Week; he had
seen the name on the passenger list, and felt sure it
must be the editor's. He seemed so trustfully to ex-
pect March to remember his own name as that of a
writer from whom he had accepted a short poem, yet

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imprinted, that the editor feigned to do so until he
really did dimly recall it. He even recalled the short
poem, and some civil words he said about it caused
Bumamy to overrun in confidences that at once touched
and amused him.

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BuRNAMY, it seemed, had taken passage on the No-
rumbia because he found, when he arrived in New York
the day before, that she was the first boat out. His
train was so much behind time that when he reached
the office of the Hanseatic League it was nominally
shut, but he pushed in by sufferance of the janitor, and
found a berth, which had just been given up, in one of
the saloon-deck rooms. It was that or nothing; and he
felt rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of
Prey, who had cabled him to come out to Carlsbad as
his secretary, would not stand the difference between the
price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth
which he would have taken if he had been allowed a
choice.

With the three hundred dollars he had got for his
book, less the price of his passage, changed into Ger-
man bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely buttoned
in the breast-pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe
from pillage as from poverty when he came out from
buying his ticket; he covertly pressed his arm against
his breast from time to time, for the joy of feeling his
money there and not from any fear of finding it gone.
He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not
believe it was he, as he rode up the lonely length of
Broadway in the cable-car, between the wild, irregular
walls of the canon which the cable -cars have all to
themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.

He went and dined, and he thought he dined well,

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at a Spanish- American restaurant, for fifty cents, with
a half-bottle of California claret included. When he
came back to Broadway he was aware that it was
stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a
cable-car again in lack of other pastime, and the mo-
tion served the purpose of a breeze, which he made
the most of by keeping his hat off. It did not really
matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was im-
paradised in weather which had nothing to do with
the temperature. Partly because he was bom to such
weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some
people with him, and partly because the world was
behaving as he had always expected, he was opulently
content with the present moment. But he thought very
tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in
the decision he had already made, to stick to Chicago
when he came back to America. New York was very
well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he
had got a foothold there; he had done better with an
Eastern publisher, he believed, by hailing from the
West, and he did not believe it would hurt him with
the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.

He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did
not mean to come home so dazzled as to see nothing
else against the American sky. He fancied, for he
really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe,
not its glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly
on his material, so as to see it more and more object-
ively. It was his power of detachment from this that
had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with
such charm as to lure a cash proposition from a pub-
lisher when he put them together for a book, but he
believed that his business faculty had much to do with
his success ; and he was as proud of that as of the book
itself. Perhaps he was not so very proud of the book ;

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he wasy at least, not vain of it; he could detach him-
self from his art as well as his material.

Like all literary temperaments, he was of a certain
hardness, in spite of the susceptibilities that could be
used to give coloring to his work. He knew this well
enough, but be believed that there were depths of un-
professional tenderness in his nature. He was good to
his mother, and he sent her money, and wrote to her in
the little Indiana town where he had left her when he
came to Chicago. After he got that invitation from the
Bird of Prey he explored his heart for some affection
that he had not felt for him before, and he found a
wish that his employer should not know it was he who
had invented that nickname for him. He promptly
avowed this in the newspaper office which formed one
of the eyries of the Bird of Prey, and made the fellows
promise not to give him away. He failed to move their
imagination when he brought up as a reason for soften-
ing toward him that he was from Burnamy's own part
of Indiana, and was a benefactor of Tippecanoe Uni-
versity, from which Burnamy was graduated. But they
relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were
glad of his good luck, which he was getting square and
not rhomboid, as most people seem to get their luck.
They liked him, and some of them liked him for his
clean young life as well as for his cleverness. His life
was known to be as clean as a girl's, and he looked like
a girl with his sweet eyes, though he had rather more
chin then most girls.

The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Bur-
namy told him he guessed he would ride back with
him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if the
conductor would put him off at the right place. It
was nearly nine o'clock, and he thought he might as

well be going over to the ship, where he had decided

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to pass the night After he found her, and went on
board, he was glad he had not gone sooner. A queasy
odor of drainage stole up from the waters of the dock,
and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of the bags
of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers ; there was
a coming and going of carts and trucks on the wharf,
and on the ship a rattling of chains and a clucking of
pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden silences
of trampling sea-boots. Bumamy looked into the din-
ing-saloon and the music-room, with the notion of try-
ing for some naps there; then he went to his state-room.
His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not come;
and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and
tumbled into his berth.

He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend
the night in receiving impressions. He could not think
of any one who had done the facts of the eve of sailing
on an Atlantic liner. He thought he would use the
material first in a letter to the paper and afterward in
a poem; but he found himself unable to grasp the no-
tion of its essential relation to the choice between
chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the
restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither;
he knew that he had begim to dream, and that he must
get up. He was just going to got up when he woke
to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the
new day outside. He looked at his watch and found it
was quarter past six ; he glanced round the state-room
and saw that he had passed the night alone in it. Then
he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth,
and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious
to lose no feature or emotion of the ship's departure.

When she was fairly off he returned to his room to

change the thick coat he had put on at the instigation

of the early morning air. His room-mate was still ab-

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sent, but he was now represented by his state-room
baggage, and Bumamy tried to infer him from it.
He perceived a social quality in his dress -coat case,
capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and sole-
leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to
his own equipment. The things were not so new as
his; they had an effect of polite experience, with a
foreign registry and customs label on them here and
there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowl-
edge, and Burnamy would have said that they were cer-
tainly English things, if it had not been for the initials
TJ. S. A. which followed the name of E. B. Triscoe on
the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the
foot of the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Bumamy through the
default of the passenger whose ticket he had got at
the last hour ; the clerk in the steamer office had been
careful to impress him with this advantage, and he
now imagined a trespass on his property. But he re-
assured himself by a glance at his ticket, and went out
to watch the ship's passage down the stream and through
the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his room
again, to see what could be done from his valise to
make him look better in the eyes of a girl whom he
had seen across the table; of course he professed a
much more general purpose. He blamed himself for
not having got at least a pair of the white tennis-
shoes which so many of the passengers were wearing;
his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet; but
there was a pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag
which he thought might do.

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper
deck; he had already missed his way to it once by
mistaking the corridor which it opened into; and he
was not sure that he was not blundering again when

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he peered down the narrow passage where he supposed
it was. A lady was standing at an open state-room
door^ resting her hands against the jambs and leaning
forward with her head within and talking to some ono
there. Before he could draw back and try another cor-
ridor he heard her say : " Perhaps he's some young man,
and wouldn't care.''

Bumamy could not make out the answer that came
from within. The lady spoke again in a tone of re-
luctant assent, " No, I don't suppose you could ; but if
he understood, perhaps he would offer.^^

She drew her head out of the room, stepping back
a pace, and lingering a moment at the threshold. She
looked round over her shoulder and discovered Bur-
namy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the
passage. She ebbed before him, and then flowed round
him in her instant. escape; with some murmured in-
coherencies about speaking to her father, she vanished
in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he
stood staring into the doorway of his room.

He had seen that she was the young lady for whom
he had come to put on his enamelled shoes, and he
saw that the person within was the elderly gentleman
who had sat next her at breakfast He begged his par-
don, as he entered, and said he hoped he should not
disturb him. " I'm afraid I left my things all over
the place when I got up this morning."

The other entreated him not to mention it, and went
on taking from his hand-bag a variety of toilet appli-
ances which the sight of made Bumamy vow to keep
his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise
all the way over. "You slept on board, then," he
suggested, arresting himself with a pair of low shoes
in his hand ; he decided to put them in a certain pocket
of his steamer bag.

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" Oh yes/* Burnamy laughed, nervously. " I came
near oversleeping, and getting oflf to sea without know-
ing it ; and I rushed out to save myself, and so — "

He began to gather up his belongings while he fol-
lowed the movements of Mr. Triscoe with a wistful
eye. He would have liked to offer his lower berth to
this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take
possession of the upper ; but he did not quite know how
to manage it. He noticed that as the other moved about
he limped slightly, unless it were rather a weary easing
of his person from one limb to the other. He stooped
to pull his trunk out from under the berth, and Bur-
namy sprang to help him.

" Let me get that out for you !" He caught it up
and put it on the sofa under the port. " Is that where
you want it ?"

" Why, yes," the other assented. " You're very
good." And as he took out his key to unlock the trunk
he relented a little further to the intimacies of the sit-
uation. " Have you arranged with the bath - steward
yet? It's such a full boat."

" No, I haven't," said Burilamy, as if he had tried
and failed ; till then he had not known that there was
a bath-steward. " Shall I get him for you ?"

" No, no. Our bedroom-steward will send him.'*

Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy
had no longer an excuse for lingering. In his defeat
concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it to be, he had
not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth. He went
away, forgetting to change his shoes ; but he came back,
and as soon as he got the enamelled shoes on, and shut
the shabby russet pair in his bag, he said, abruptly:
"Mr. Triscoe, I wish youM take the lower berth. I
got it at the eleventh hour by some fellow's giving it
up, and it isn't as if I'd bargained for it a month ago/'

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The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances
in which Burnamy fancied suspicion and even resent-
ment But he said, after the moment of reflection
which he gave himself, " Why, thank you, if you donH
mind, really."

" Not at all !" cried the young man. " I should like
the upper berth better. We'll have the steward change
the sheets."

" Oh, I'll see that he does that," said Mr. Triscoe.
" I couldn't allow you to take any trouble about it."
He now looked as if he wished Burnamy would go, and
leave him to his domestic arrangements.

'In telling about himself, Burnamy touched only upon
the points which he believed would take his listener's
intelligent fancy, and he stopped so long before he had
tired him that March said he would like to introduce
him to his wife. He saw in the agreeable young fellow
an image of his own youth, with some diflferences
which, he was willing to own, were to the young fel-
low's advantage. But they were both from the Middle
West; in their native accent and their local tradition
they were the same ; they were the same in their aspira-
tions ; they were of one blood in their literary impulse
to extemate their thoughts and emotions.

Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled
shoes, that he would be delighted, and when her hus-
band brought him up to her, Mrs. March said she was
always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine,
and asked him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who
was her favorite. Without giving him time to reply
to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that
she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and
whom his father had left in charge of Every Other

Week for the few months they were to be gone; that
* 47

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they had a daughter married and living in Chicago.
She made him sit down by her in March's chair, and
before he left them March heard him magnanimously
asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do some-
thing more for the magazine soon. He sauntered away
and did not know how quickly Bumamy left this ques-
tion to say, with the laugh and blush which became him
in her eyes :

" Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell
you about, if you will let me."

" Why, certainly, Mr. Bumamy," she began, but she
saw that he did not wish her to continue.

" Because," he went on, " it's a little matter that I
shouldn't like to go wrong in."

He told her of his having overheard what Miss Tris-
coe had said to her father, and his belief that she was
talking about the lower berth. He said he would have
wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid they
might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to
do it.

" I see," said Mrs. March ; and she added, thought-
fully : " She looks like rather a proud girl."

" Yes," the young fellow sighed.

" She is very charming," she continued, thoughtfully,
but not so judicially.

" Well," Bumamy owned, " that is certainly one of
the complications," and they laughed together.

She stopped herself after saying, "I see what you
mean," and suggested, " I think I should be guided by
circumstances. It needn't be done at once, I suppose."

" Well," Bumamy began, and then he broke out, with
a laugh of embarrassment, " I've done it already."

" Oh f Then it wasn't my advice, exactly, that you
wanted."

"No—"

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"And how did he take it r

" He said he should be glad to make the exchange if
I really didn't mind." Bumamy had risen restlessly,
and she did not ask him to stay. She merely said :

" Oh, well, I'm glad it turned out so nicely."

" I'm so glad you think it was the thing to do." He
managed to laugh again, but he could not hide from her
that he was not feeling altogether satisfied. " Would
you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him ?" he asked,
as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.

"Do, please!" she entreated, and it seemed to her
that he had hardly left her when her husband came up.
" Why, where in the world did he find you so soon ?"

"Did you send him for me? I was just hanging
round for him to go." March sank into the chair at
her side. " Well, is he going to marry her ?"

" Oh, you may laugh ! But there is something very
exciting !" She told him what had happened, and of her
belief that Bumamy's handsome behavior had somehow
not been met in kind.

March gave himself the pleasure of an immense
laugh. " It seems to me that this Mr. Bumamy of
yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was en-
titled to. Why shouldn't he have offered him the lower
berth? And why shouldn't the old gentleman have
taken it just as he did? Did you want him to make
a counter-offer of his daughter's hand ? If he does, I
hope Mr. Bumamy won't come for your advice till after
he's accepted her."

" He wasn't very candid. I hoped you would speak
about that. Don't you think it was rather natural,
though ?"

" For him, very likely. But I think you would call

it sinuous in some one you hadn't taken a fancy to."

" No, no. I wish to be just. I don't see how he

49*

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oould have come straight at it. And he did own up
at last" She asked him what Bumamy had done for
the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that
one small poem, yet unprinted; he was rather vague
about its value, but said it had temperament.

" He has temperament, too," she commented, and she
had made him tell her everything he knew, or could bo
forced to imagine about Bumamy, before she let the
talk turn to other things.

The life of the promenade had already settled into
seafaring form ; the steamer chairs were full, and peo-
ple were reading or dozing in them with an effect of
long habit. Those who would be walking up and down
had begun their walks; some had begun going in and
out of the smoking-room; ladies who were easily af-
fected by the motion were lying down in the music-
room. Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals
along the rail, and the promenaders were obliged to
double on a briefer course or work slowly round them.
Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss parties
at another were forming among the young people. It
was as lively and it was as dull as it would be two thou-
sand miles at sea. It was not the least cooler, yet ; but
if you sat still you did not suffer.

In the prompt monotony the time was already pass-
ing swiftly. The deck-steward seemed hardly to have
been round with tea and bouillon, and he had not yet
gathered up all the empty cups when the horn for limch
sounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewards who
gave the summons to meals; and whenever the pretty
boy appeared with his bugle funny passengers gathered
round him to make him laugh and stop him from wind-
ing it. His part of the joke was to fulfil his duty with
gravity, and only to give way to a smile of triumph as
he walked off.

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At hmch, in the faded excitement of their first meet-
ings the people at the Marches' table did not renew the
premature intimacy of their breakfast talk. Mrs. March
went to lie down in her berth afterward, and March
went on deck without her. He began to walk to and
from the barrier between the first and second cabin
promenades; lingering near it, and musing pensively,
for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent
and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their
pecuniary betters of the saloon.

There were two women, a mother and daughter,
whom he fancied to be teachers, by their looks, going
out for a little rest, or perhaps for a little further study
to fit them more perfectly for their work. They gazed
wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the
barrier; and he feigned a conversation with them and
tried to convince them that the stamp of inferiority
which their poverty put upon them was just, or, if not
just, then inevitable. He argued with them that the
sort of barrier which here prevented their being friends
with him, if they wished it, ran invisibly through so-
ciety everywhere ; but he felt ashamed before their kind,
patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to
excuse the fact he was defending. Was it any worse,
he asked them, than their not being invited to the en-
tertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue? He
made them own that if they were let across that barrier
the whole second cabin would have a logical right to
follow ; and they were silenced. But they continued to
gaze at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he
returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it
no longer, and strolled off toward the steerage.

There was more reason why the passengers there

should be penned into a little space of their own in

the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck at the

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

bow. They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any
had made their fortunes in our country they were hid-
ing their prosperity in the return to their own. They
could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid
than they were going away ; but he thought their aver-
age less apathetic than that of the saloon passengers,
as he leaned over the rail and looked down at them.
Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the
lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and
laughing as they writhed with the current. A young
mother, seated flat on the deck, with her bare feet stuck
out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed
and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied
in a shawl walked about the pen and smiled grotesque-
ly with the well side of his toothache-swollen face. The
owner of the battery carried it away, and a group of lit-
tle children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered
in the space he had left and looked up at a passenger
near March who was eating some plums and cherries
which he had brought from the luncheon-table. He be-
gan to throw the fruit down to them, and the children,
scrambled for it

An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face,
said, " I shouldn't want a child of mine down there.'*

" No," March responded ; " it isn't quite what one
would choose for one's own. It's astonishing, though,
how we reconcile ourselves to it in the case of
others."

^^ I suppose it's something we'll have to get used to
on the other side," suggested the stranger.

"Well," answered March, "you have some oppor-
tunities to get Used to it on this side, if you happen to
live in New York," and he went on to speak of the
raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of com-
fort where he lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

seemed as glad of alms in food or money as this poverty
of the steerage.

The other listened restively, like a man whose ideals
are disturbed. " I don^t believe I should like to live
in New York much," he said, and March fancied that
he wished to be asked where he did live. It appeared
that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town ; he did
not brag of it, but he said it suited him. He added
that he had never expected to go to Europe, but that
he had begun to nm down lately, and his doctor thought
he had better go out and try Cfirlsbad.

March said, to invite his further confidence, that this
was exactly his own case. The Ohio man met the over-
ture from a common invalidism as if it detracted from
his own distinction ; and he turned to speak of the dif-
ficulty he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home.
His heart opened a little with the word, and he said
how comfortable he and his wife were in their house,
and how much they both hated to shut it up. When
March offered him his card he said he had none of his
own with him, but that his name was Eltwin. He be-
trayed a simple wish to have March realize the local
importance he had left behind him ; and it was not hard
to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the
lapel of his coat, and he knew that he was in the pres-
ence of a veteran.

He tried to guess his rank, in telling his wife about
him, when he went down to find her just before din-
ner, but he ended with a certain sense of affliction.
" There are too many elderly invalids on this ship. I
knock against people of my own age everywhere. Why
are'nt your youthful lovers more in evidence, my dear ?
I don't believe they are lovers, and I b^n to doubt if
they're young even.''

" It wasn't very satisfactory at lunch, certainly," she

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

ovmed* " But I know it will be different at dinner."
She was putting herself together after a nap that had
made up for the lost sleep of the night before. " I want
you to look very nice, dear. Shall you dress for din-
ner ?" she asked her husband^s image in the state-room
glass which she was preoccupying.

" I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots/' it an-
swered.

" I have heard that they always dress for dinner on
the big Cunard and White Star boats when it^s good
weather," she went on, placidly. " I shouldn't want
those people to think you were not up in the conve-
nances/^

They both knew that she meant the reticent father
and daughter, and March flung out : " I shouldn't want
them to think you weren't. There's such a thing as
overdoing."

She attacked him at another point " What has an-
noyed you ? What else have you been doing ?"

"Nothing. I've been reading most of the after-
noon."

'' The Maiden Knightr

This was the book which nearly everybody had
brought on board. It was just out, and had caught
an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal wave.
It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance
of medisBval life, and gratified the perennial passion
of both sexes for historical romance, while it flattered
woman's instinct of superiority by the celebration of
her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous
and wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.

March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she
pursued : " I suppose you didn't waste time looking if
anybody had brought the last copy of Every Other
Weekr

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

"Yes, I did; and I found the one yOu had left in
your steamer chair — for advertising purposes, prob-
ably."

" Mr. Bumamy has another," she said. " I saw it
sticking out of his pocket this morning."

"Oh yes. He told me he had got it on the train
from Chicago to see if it had his poem in it. He's an
ingenuous soul — in some ways."

'" Well, that is the very reason why you ought to
find out whether the men are going to dress, and let
him know. He would never think of it himself."

" Neither would I," said her husband.

" Very wdl, if you wish to spoil his chance at the
outset," she sighed.

She did not quite know whether to be glad or not
that the men were all in sacks and cutaways at dinner ;
it saved her from shame for her husband and Mr.
Bumamy; but it put her in the wrong. Every one
talked; even the father and daughter talked with each
other, and at one moment Mrs. March could not be
quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when
she spoke. She could not be mistaken in the remark
which the father addressed to Bumamy, though it led
to nothing.

The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first din-
ner out is apt to be ; and it went gayly on from soup
to fruit, which was of the American abundance and
variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness im-
parted by the ice -closet. Everybody was eating it,
when by a common consciousness they were aware of
alien witnesses. They looked up as by a single im-
pulse, and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage
passenger staring down upon their luxury; he held on
his arm a child that shared his regard with yet hungrier
eyes. A boy's nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

height of the man's elbow ; a young girl peered over his
other arm.

The passengers glanced at one another ; the two table-
stewards, with their napkins in their hands, smiled
vaguely and made some indefinite movements.

The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell.
^' Vm glad it didn't begin with the Little Neck clams !"

" Probably they only let those people come for the
dessert," March suggested.

The widow now followed the direction of the other
eyes, and looked up over her shoulder; she gave a
little cry and shrank down. The young bride made
her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her hus-
band looked severe, as if he were going to do something,
but refrained, not to make a scene. The reticent father
threw one of his staccato glances at the port, and Mrs.
March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look
at Bumamy.

The young fellow laughed. " I don't suppose there's
anything to be done about it, unless we pass out a
plate."

Mr. Kenby shook his head. " It wouldn't do. We
might send for the captain. Or the chief steward."

The faces at the port vanished. At other ports pro-
files passed and repassed, as if the steerage passengers
had their promenade imder them, but they paused no
more.

The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and
from her exasperated nerves Mrs. March denounced the
arrangement of the ship which had made such a cruel
thing possible.

" Oh," he mocked, " they had probably had a good,
substantial meal of their own, and the scene of our
banquet was of the quality of a picture, a purely aes-
thetic treat. But supposing it wasn't, we're doing some-

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

thing like it every day and ever moment of our lives.
The Norumbia is a piece of the whole world's civiliza-
tion set afloat, and passing from shore to shore with un-
changed classes and conditions. A ship's merely a small
stage, where we're brought to close quarters with the
daily drama of humanity."

" Well, then," she protested, " I don't like being
brought to close quarters with the daily drama of hu-
manity, as you call it. And I don't believe that the
large English ships are built so that the steerage pas-
sengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one
is eating; and I'm sorry we came on the Norumbia.^^

"Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide any-
thing," he began, and he was going to speak of the
men in the furnace-pits of the steamer, how they fed
the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished
in it crept out on the forecastle like blanched phan-
tasms of toil ; but she interposed in time.

" If there's anything worse, for pity's sake don't tell
me," she entreated, and he forebore.

He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed
to have even death in it, and then how as he had grown
older death had come into it more and more, and suf-
fering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be
kept out of sight. He wondered if that young Bumamy
now saw the world as he used to see it, a place for mak-
ing verse and making love, and full of beauty of all
kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases. He had lived
a happy life ; Bumamy would be lucky if he should live
one half as happy; and yet if he could show him his
whole happy life, just as it had truly been, must not
the young man shrink from such a picture of his future ?

" Say something," said his wife. " What are you
thinking about ?"

" Oh, Bumamy," he answered, honestly enough.

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

" I was thinking about the children/^ she said. ^^ I
am glad Bella didn't try to come from Chicago to see
us off; it would have been too silly; she is getting to
be very sensible. I hope Tom won't take the covers off
the furniture when he has the fellows in to see him."

" Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out
of the place, even if the moths eat up every stick of
furniture."

" Yes, so do I. And, of course, you're wishing that
you were there with him!" March laughed guiltily.
" Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for us to start off
alone for Europe at our age."

" Nothing of the kind," he retorted in the necessity
he perceived for staying her drooping spirits. " I
wouldn't be anywhere else on any account. Isn't it
perfectly delicious ? It puts me in mind of that night
on the Lake Ontario boat when we were starting for
Montreal. There was the same sort of red sunset, and
the air wasn't a bit softer than this."

He spoke of a night on their wedding journey when
they were still new enough from Europe to be compar-
ing everything at home with things there.

" Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it
again," she said, and they talked a long time of the
past.

All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull
air, and the wash of the ship's course through the wave-
less sea made itself pleasantly heard. In the offing a
steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close
that her lights outlined her to the eye; she sAit up
some signal rockets that soared against the purple
heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the No-
rumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that
meet in the dark.

Mrs. March wondered what had become of Buma-

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

my; the promenaders were much freer now than they
had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go
below, she caught sight of Bumamy walking the deck
transversely with some lady. She clutched her hus-
band's arm and stayed him in rich conjecture.

" Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with
him already V^

They waited till Bumamy and his companion came
in sight again. She was tilting forward, and turning
from the waist, now to him and now from him.

*^ No ; it's that pivotal girl," said March ; and his
wife said, " Well, I'm glad he won't be put down by
them."

In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at
the instant she passed on down the stairs the daughter
was saying to the father, " I don't see why you didn't
tell me sooner, papa."

" It was such an unimportant matter that I didn't
think to mention it. He offered it, and I took it; that
was all. What difference could it have made to you t"

" None. But one doesn't like to do any one an in-
justice."

" I didn't know you were thinking anything about it"

" No, of course not."

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The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which
passengers say they have never seen anything like,
though for the first two or three days out neither the
doctor nor the deck-steward could be got to prophesy
when the ship would be in. There was only a day or
two when it could really be called rough, and the sea-
sickness was confined to those who seemed wilful suf-
ferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the
stairs - landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef -tea
without qualifying the monotonous well-being of the
other passengers, who passed without noticing them.

The second morning there was rain, and the air fresh-
ened, but the leaden sea lay level as before. The sun
shone in the afternoon; with the sunset the fog came
thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the
night ; from the dense folds of the mist answering noises
called back to her. Just before dark two men in a dory
shouted up to her close under her bows, and then melted
out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of fishing-
schooners were seen, and their bells pealed ; once loud
cries from a vessel near at hand made themselves heard.
Some people in the dining-saloon sang hymns ; the smok-
ing-room was dense with cigar fumes, and the card-
players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of
the fog without.

The Norumhm was off the "Banks, and the second
day of fog was cold as if icebergs were haunting the
opaque pallor around her. In the ranks of steamer

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrap-
pings; in the music-room the little children of travel
discussed the different lines of steamers on which they
had crossed, and habes of five and seven disputed about
the motion on the Cunarders and WTiite Stars; their
nurses tried in vain to still them in behalf of older pas-
sengers trying to write letters there.

By the next morning the ship had run out of the
fog; and people who could keep their feet said they
were glad of the greater motion which they found be-
yond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the
first days out, and how much they had suffered ; some
who had passed the night on board before sailing tried
to impart a sense of their misery in trying to sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the
sailors stretched canvas along the weather promenade
and put up a sheathing of boards across the bow end
to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and the
sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the wid-
est space of the lee promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer of-
fered themselves in their poor variety. Once a ship
in the offing, with all its square sails set, lifted them
like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of
the ocean the length of some westward liner blocked
itself out against the horizon, and swiftly trailed its
smoke out of sight. A few tramp steamers, lounging
and lunging through the trough of the sea, were over-
taken and left behind ; an old brigantine passed so close
that her rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could
discern the faces of the people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any
life beyond her. One day a small bird beat the air
with its little wings, under the roof of the promenade,
and then flittered from sight over the surface of the

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THEIE SILVER WEDDING JOUBNEY

waste ; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their
rise, plunged clumsily from wave to wave. The deep
itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificiality of
the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid
and cold in color; but there was a morning when it
was delicately misted, and where the mist left it clear,
it was blue and exquisitely iridescent imder the pale
sun ; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the fall-
ing spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when
it was not like painted canvas, it was hard like black
rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage. Where it met
the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher
weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of
surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours ;
then the clouds broke and let a little simshine through,
to close again before the dim evening thickened over
the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the
ragged curtain of vapors ; one night it seemed to shine
till morning, and shook a path of quicksilver from the
horizon to the ship. Through every change, after she
had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with tho
pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man^s
heart stops) in a course which had nothing to mark it
but the spread of the furrows from her sides, and the
wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge
of the sea.

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a
sodden monotony, with certain events which were part
of the monotony. In the morning the little steward's
bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and
half an hour later called them to their breakfast, after
such as chose had been served with coffee by their bed-
room - stewards. Then they went on deck, where they
read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

or stood in the way of those who were walking; or
played shuffleboard and ring-toss, or smoked, and drank
whiskey and aerated waters over their cards and papers
in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or
the music-room. At eleven o'clock they spoiled their
appetites for lunch with tea or bouillon to the music
of a band of second-cabin stewards; at one, a single
blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they
glutted themselves to the torpor from which they after-
ward drowsed in their berths or chairs. They did the
same things in the afternoon that they had done in the
forenoon; and at four o'clock the deck-stewards came
round with their cups and saucers, and their plates of
sandwiches, again to the music of the band. There were
two bugle-calls for dinner, and after dinner some went
early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills and
toast. At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons
and the smoking-rooms.

There were various smells which stored themselves
up in the consciousness to remain lastingly relative to
certain moments and places: a whiff of whiskey and
tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-
room ; the odor of oil and steam rising from the open
skylights over the engine-room ; the scent of stale bread
about the doors of the dining-saloon.

The life was like the life at a sea -side hotel, only
more monotonous. The walking was limited ; the talk
was the tentative talk of people aware that there was
no refuge if they got tired of one another. The flirt-
ing itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in
the glare of the pervasive publicity; it must be crude
and bold, or not be at all.

There seemed to be very little of it. There were not

many young people on board of saloon quality, and

these were mostly girls. The yoimg men were mainly
5 63

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

of the smoking-room sort ; they seldom risked themselves
among the steamer chairs. It was gayer in the second
cabin, and gayer yet in the steerage, where robnster
emotions were operated by the accordion. The pas-
sengers there danced to its music ; they sang to it and
laughed to it unabashed under the eyes of the first-
cabin witnesses clustered along the rail above the pit
where they took their rude pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of
each long, swift day in his berth with a book imder
the convenient electric light. He was safe there from
the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves
only to fall into disintegration, and cling to him after-
ward as inorganic particles of weather - guessing and
smoking-room gossip about the ship's run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that
he saw some faces of the great world, the world of
wealth and fashion; but these afterward vanished, and
left him to wonder where they hid themselves. He did
not meet them even in going to and from his meals ; he
could only imagine them served in those palatial state-
rooms whose interiors the stewards now and then rather
obtruded upon the public. There were people whom he
encountered in the promenades when he got up for the
sunrise, and whom he never saw at other times ; at mid-
night he met men prowling in the dark whom he never
met by day. But none of these were people of the great
world. Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-
cabin passengers, whose barrier was then lifted for a
little while to give them the freedom of the saloon
promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up his

Ohioan, and revive from a closer study of him his

interest in the rare American who had never been to

Europe. But he kept with his elderly wife, who had

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

the effect of withholding him from Marches advances.
Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw off more and more
their disguise of a long-married pair, and became frank-
ly bride and groom. They seldom talked with any one
else, except at table ; they walked up and down together,
smiling into each other's faces; they sat side by side
in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them both,
and there was reason to believe that they were holding
each other's hands under it

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March
when her husband was straying about the ship or read-
ing in his berth; and the two ladies must have ex-
changed autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to
tell him just how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow,
w^hat her husband died of, and what had been done to
save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her
boy, and was taking him abroad, with some notion of
going to Switzerland, after the summer's travel, and
settling down with him at school there. She and Mrs.
March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother
called him, attached himself reverently to March, not
only as a celebrity of the first grade in his quality of
editor of Every Other WeeJc, but as a sage of wisdom
and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance
of counsel upon almost every hypothesis and exigency
of life.

March could not bring himself to place Bumamy
quite where he belonged in contemporary literature,
when Rose put him very high in virtue of the poem
which he heard Bumamy was going to have printed
in Every Other Week, and of the book which he was
going to have published; and he let the boy bring to
the young fellow the flattery which can come to any
author but once, in the first request for his autograph
that Bumamy confessed to have had. They were so

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

near in age, though they were ten years apart, that
Rose stood much more in awe of Bumamy than of
others much more his seniors. He was often in the
company of Kenby, whom he valued next to March, as
a person acquainted with men ; he consulted March upon
Kenby^s practice of always taking up the language of
the country he visited, if it were only for a fomight;
and he conceived a higher opinion of him from March's
approval,

Bumamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him.
talk about himself when he supposed he was talking
about literature, in the hope that she could get him
to talk about the Triscoes ; but she listened in vain as
he poured out his soul in theories of literary art, and
in histories of what he had written and what he meant
to write. When he passed them where they sat to-
gether, March heard the yoimg fellow's perpetually re-
curring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me, me ; and smiled to
think how she was suffering under the drip-drip of his
innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions
to the pivotal girl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to
him, in which a less penetrating scrutiny could have
detected no change from meal to meal. It was only at
table that she could see them together, or that she could
note any break in the reserve of the father and daugh-
ter. The signs of this were so fine that when she re-
ported them March laughed in scornful incredulity.
But at breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with
the authority of people accustomed to social considera-
tion, suddenly turned to the Marches, and began to
make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March
of Every Other Week, which he seemed to know of in
its relation to him; and the young girl addressed her-
self to Mrs. March's motherly sense not the less accept-

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

ably because indirectly. She spoke of going out with
her father for an indefinite time, as if it were rather
his wish than hers, and she made some inquiries about
places in Germany; they had never been in Germany.
They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of
Dresden with its American colony seemed rather
tiresome, and did Mrs. March know anything about
Weimar ?

Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew noth-
ing about any place in Germany; and she explained
perhaps too fully where and why she was going with
her husband. She fancied a Boston note in that scorn
for the tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girPs stylo
was of New York rather than of Boston, and her ac-
cent was not quite of either place. Mrs. March began
to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine
them and to class them. She had decided from the
first that they were society people, but they were cul-
tivated beyond the average of the few swells whom
she had met; and there had been nothing offensive in
their manner of holding themselves aloof from the other
people at the table ; they had a right to do that if they
chose.

When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the
talk went on between these and the Marches ; the Tris-
coes presently left the table, and Mrs. March rose soon
after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which
March knew he should not be able to postpone. He
agreed with her that they were society people, but she
could not at once accept his theory that they had them-
selves been the objects of an advance from them because
of their neutral literary quality, through which they
were of no social world, but potentially conmaon to any.
Later she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of
argument, though what she wanted him to see, now,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

was that this was all a step of the girl's toward finding
out something about Burnamy.

The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward
was making his round with his cups, Miss Triscoe
abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring cor-
ner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one
accustomed to have her advances gratefully received,
if she might sit by her. The girl took March's vacant
chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she
continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first
sip. Mrs. March did the same with hers, and at the
moment she had got very tired of doing it, Burnamy
came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave
her a hundredth bow with a hundredth smile. He per-
ceived that she wished to get rid of her cup, and he
sprang to her relief.

" May I take yours, too ?" he said very passively to
Miss Triscoe. ^

" You are very good,'' she answered, and^ave it

Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, "Do you
know Mr. Burnamy, Miss Triscoe?" The girl said a
few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to make talk
with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs.
March. The pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turn-
ing in a rare moment of isolation at the comer of the
liiusic-room, and he bowed abruptly and hurried off to
join her.

Miss Triscoe did not linger ; she alleged the necessity
of looking up her father, and went away with a smile
so friendly that Mrs. March might easily have construed
it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in Miss
Triscoe's mind.

" Then you don't feel that it was a very distinct suc-
cess ?" her husband asked on his return.

" N"ot on the surface," she said.

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

'^ Better let ill enougH alone/' he advised.

She did not heed him. " All the same, she cares for
him. The very fact that she was so cold shows that.''

" And do you think her being cold will make him care
for her?"

" If she wants it to."

At dinner that day the question of The Maiden
Knight was debated among the noises and silences of
the band. Young Mrs. LefFers had brought the book
to the table with her; she said she had not been able
to lay it down before the last horn sounded; in fact,
she could have been seen reading it to her husband
where he sat under the same shawl the whole after-
noon. "Don't you think it's perfectly fascinating?"
she asked Mrs. Adding, with her petted mouth.

" Well," said the widow, doubtfully, " it's nearly a
week since I read it, and I've had time to get over the
glow."

"Oh, I could just read it forever!" the bride ex-
claimed.

" I like a book," said her husband, " that takes me
out of myself. I don't want to think when I'm read-
ing."

March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected
in time that Mr. Leilers had really stated his own mo-
tive in reading. He compromised. " Well, I like the
author to do my thinking for me."

" Yes," said the other, " that is what I mean.'*

" The question is whether The Maiden Knight fel-
low does it," said Kenby, taking duck and pease from
the steward at his shoulder.

" What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman
can do and be single-handed," said March.

" No," his wife corrected him, " what a man thinks
she can."

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

'' I suppose," said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, " that
we're like the English in our habit of going off about
a book like a train of powder."

"If you'll say a row of bricks," March assented,
" I'll agree with you. It's certainly Anglo - Saxon to
fall over one another as we do, when we get going. It
would be interesting to know just how much liking there
is in the popularity of a given book."

"It's like the run of a song, isn't it?" Kenby sug-
gested. " You can't stand either when it reaches a
given point."

He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had
hitherto ignored the rest of the table.

" It's very curious," March said. " The book or the
song catches a mood, or feeds a craving, and when one
passes or the other is glutted — "

" The discouraging part is," Triscoe put in, still
limiting himself to the Marches, "that it's never a
question of real taste. The things that go down with
us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a
vulgar palate — Now in France, for instance," he sug-
gested.

" Well, I don't know," returned the editor. " After
all, we eat a good deal of bread, and we drink more
pure water than any other people. Even when we
drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she
said, " If we can't get ice - water in Europe, I don't
know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the talk threat-
ened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of
American and European customs.

Bumamy could not bear to let it. " I don't pretend
to be very well up in French literature," he began, " but
I think such a book as The Maiden Knight isn't such a
bad piece of work ; people are liking a pretty well-built

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

story when they like it. Of course, it's sentimental,
and it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines
something heroic in character, and it makes the reader
imagine it, too. The man who wrote that book may be
a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half.
By-and-by he'll do something — after he's come to see
that his Maiden Knight was a fool — that I believe even
you won't be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic
type as powerfully as he does in this book."

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and,
though he deferred to March in the end, he deferred
with authority still. March liked him for coming to
the defence of a young writer whom he had not him-
self learned to like yet. " Yes," he said, " if he has
the power you say, and can keep it after he comes to
his artistic consciousness."

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her
way, smiled; Rose Adding listened with shining eyes
expectantly fixed on March; his mother viewed his
rapture with tender amusement. The steward was at
Kenby's shoulder with the salad and his entreating
" Bleace!'' and Triscoe seemed to be questioning wheth-
er he should take any notice of Bumamy's general dis-
agreement. He said at last : " I'm afraid we haven't
the documents. You don't seem to have cared much for
French books, and I haven't read The Maiden KnighV^
He added to March: "But I don't defend absinthe.
Ice-water is better. What I object to is our indiscrim-
inate taste both for raw whiskey and for milk-and-
water."

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby
who spoke next. " The doctor thinks, if this weather
holds, that we shall be into Plymouth Wednesday morn-
ing. I always like to get a professional opinion on the
ship's run."

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in
her portfolio the journal-letter which she was writing
to send back from Plymouth to her children, Miss Tris-
coe drifted to the place where she sat at their table in
the dining-room by a coincidence which they both re-
spected as casual.

"We had quite a literary dinner,'' she remarked,
hovering for a moment near the chair which she later
sank into. " It must have made you feel very much
at home. Or perhaps you're so tired of it at home that
you don't talk about books."

" We always talk shop in some form or other," said
Mrs. March. " My husband never tires of it. A good
many of the contributors come to us, you know."

" It must be delightful," said the girl. She added,
as if she ought to excuse herself for neglecting an ad-
vantage that might have been hers if she had chosen:
" I'm sorry one sees so little of the artistic and literary
set But New York is such a big place."

" New York people seem to be very fond of it," said
Mrs. March — " those who have always lived there."

" We haven't always lived there," said the girl.
" But I think one has a good time there — the best
time a girl can have. It's all very well coming over
for the summer; one has to spend the summer some-
where. Are you going out for a long time ?"

" Only for the summer. First to Carlsbad."

" Oh yes. I suppose we shall travel about through
Germany, and then go to Paris. We always do; my
father is very fond of it."

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

" I was bom there — if that means knowing it. I

lived there till I was eleven years old. We came home

after my mother died."

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

"Ohr said Mrs. March.

The girl did not go further into her family history ;
but by one of those leaps which seem to women as
logical as other progressions she arrived at asking, " Is
Mr. Bumamy one of the — contributors ?"

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

"PoemT

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

" I thought he spoke very nicely about The Maiden
Knight, And he has been very nice to papa. You
know they have the same room."

^' I think Mr. Bumamy told me," Mrs. March said.

The girl went on : " He had the lower berth, and he
gave it up to papa ; he's done everything but turn him-
self out-of-doors."

"I'm sure he's been very glad," Mrs. March vent-
ured on Bumamy's behalf, but very softly, lest if she
breathed upon these budding confidences they should
shrink and wither away.

" I always tell papa that there's no country like
America for real unselfishness ; and if they're all like
that in Chicago — " The girl stopped, and added with
a laugh, " But I'm always quarrelling with papa about
America."

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

But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she
had said all she meant, or because she had said all she
would, about Chicago, which Mrs. March felt for the
present to be one with Bumamy. She gave another of
her leaps. " I don't see why people are so anxious to
get it like Europe, at home. They say that there was
a time when there were no chaperons — before hoops,
you know." She looked suggestively at Mrs. March,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

resting one slim hand on the table^ and controlling her
skirt with the other, as if she were getting ready to rise
at any moment. " When they used to sit on their steps."

" It was very pleasant before hoops — in every way,"
said Mrs. March. " I was young then ; and I lived
in Boston, where I suppose it was always simpler than
in New York. I used to sit on our steps. It was de-
lightful for girls — ^the freedom."

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

" Well, there must be places where it's before hoops
yet: Seattle and Portland, Oregon, for all I know,"
Mrs. March suggested. " And there must be people in
that epoch everywhere."

" Like that young lady who twists and turns ?" said
Miss Triscoe, giving first one side of her face and then
the other. " They have a good time. I suppose if
Europe came to us in one way it had to come in an-
other. If it came in galleries and all that sort of thing,
it had to come in chaperons. You'll think Fm a great
extremist, Mrs. March ; but sometimes I wish there was
more America instead of less. I don't believe it's as
bad as people say. Does Mr. March," she asked, taking
hold of the chair with one hand, to secure her footing
from any caprice of the sea, while she gathered her
skirt more firmly into the other as she rose — " does he
think that America is going all wrong ?"

"All wrong? How?"

" Oh, in politics, don't you know. And government,
and all that. And bribing. And the lower classes hav-
ing everything their own way. And the horrid news-
papers. And everything getting so expensive ; and no
regard for family, or anything of that kind."

Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe

meant, but she answered, still cautiously: "I don't

believe he does always. Though there are times when

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

he is very muck disgusted. Then he says that he is
getting too old — and we always quarrel about that — ^to
see things as they really are. He says that if the
world had been going the way that people over fifty
have always thought it was going, it would have gone
to smash in the time of the anthropoidal apes.*'

"Oh yes — Darwin," said Miss Triscoe, vaguely.
" Well, Fm glad he doesn't give it up. I didn't know
but I was holding out just because I had argued so
much, and was doing it out of — opposition. Good-
night 1" She called her salutation gayly over her shoul-
der, and Mrs. March watched her gliding out of the
saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of
the ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice,
and wondered if Bumamy was afraid of her ; it seemed
to her that if she were a young man she should not be
afraid of Miss Triscoe.

The next morning, just after she had arranged her-
self in her steamer chair, he approached her, bowing
and smiling, with the first of his many bows and smiles
for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came
toward her from the opposite direction. She nodded
brightly to him, and he gave her a bow and smile, too ;
he always had so many of them to spare.

"Here is your chair!" Mrs. March called to her,
drawing the shawl out of the chair next her own. " Mr.
March is wandering about the ship somewhere."

"I'll keep it for him," said Miss Triscoe, and as
Burnamy offered to take the shawl that hung in the
hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his hand with
an " Oh, thank you," which seemed also a permission
for him to wrap it about her in the chair.

He stood talking before the ladies, but He looked up
and down the promenade. The pivotal girl showed her-
self at the comer of the music-room, as she had done

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IHEIE SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

tHe day before. At first she revolved there as if she
were shedding her light on some one hidden round the
comer; then she moved a few paces farther out and
showed herself more obviously alone. Clearly she was
there for Bumamy to come and walk with her; Mrs.
March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe
saw it, too. She waited for her to dismiss him to his
flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept chatting on, and ho
kept answering and making no motion to get away.
Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was
ashamed for him. Then she heard him saying, " Would
you like a turn or two?^' and Miss Triscoe answering,
*• Why, yes, thank you," and promptly getting out of her
chair as if the pains they had both been at to get her
settled in it were all nothing.

She had the composure to say, " You can leave your
shawl with me, Miss Triscoe," and to receive her fer-
vent, " Oh, thank you," before they sailed oflF together,
with inhuman indifference to the girl at the comer of
the music-room. Then she sank into a kind of trium-
phal collapse, from which she roused herself to point
her husband to the chair beside her when he happened
along.

He chose to be perverse about her romance. " Well,
now, you had better let them alone. Remember Ken-
dricks." He meant one of their young friends whose
love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage
left them in lasting doubt of what they had done. " My
sympathies are all with the pivotal girl. Hadn't she as
much right to him, for the time being, or for good and
all, as Miss Triscoe ?"

" That depends upon what you think of Bumamy."

" Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man

snatched away from her just when she's made sure of

him. How do you suppose she is feeling now?"

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THEIE SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

" She isn't feeling at all. She's letting her revolving
light fall upon half a dozen- other young men by this
time, collectively or consecutively. All that she wants
to make sure of is that they're young men — or old ones,
even."

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife
said. " Fve been having a little talk with Papa Tris-
coe in the smoking-room."

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

"Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout. He
doesn't think things are going as they should in Amer-
ica. He hasn't been consulted, or, if he has, his opinion
hasn't been acted upon."

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

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

"What?"

" That there's no chance for Bumamy. He's taking
his daughter out to marry her to a crowned head."

It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the
south promenade. Everybody came and looked, and the
circle around the waltzers was three or four deep. Be-
tween the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats
of the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces
of the men who were wheeling and whirling them, rose
and sank with the rhythm of their steps. The space
allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with can-
vas, and was prettily treated with German and Amer-
ican flags: it was hard to go wrong with flags, Miss
Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March's wing.

Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face,
flashing and flushing in the dance; at the end of the

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THEIR SILVEE WEDDING JOUENEY

first piece he came to them, and remained talking and
laughing till the music began again.

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

" Isn't it rather — ^public V^ she asked back.

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had
put through her arm thrill with temntation ; but Buma-
my could not.

" Perhaps it is rather obvious/' he said, and he made
a long glide over the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl,
anticipating another young man who was rapidly ad-
vancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment
her hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary
proximity to each other within the circle.

" How well she dances !" said Miss Triscoe.

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

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

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon
for one of the marine charities which address them-
selves to the hearts and pockets of passengers on all
steamers. There were recitations in English and Ger-
man, and songs from several people who had kindly
consented, and ever more piano performance. Most of
those who took part were of the race gifted in art
and finance; its children excelled in the music, and
its fathers counted the gate-money during the last half
of the programme, with an audible clinking of the sil-
ver on the table before them.

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March
was herself chaperoned by Mr. Bumamy: her husband
had refused to come to the entertainment She hoped
to leave Bumamy and Miss Triscoe together before the
evening ended ; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with
her father, in quitting the saloon, to laugh at some f eat-

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ures of the entertainment, as people who take no part
in such things do ; Bumamy stood up to exchange some
unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-
night

The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia
came to anchor in the pretty harbor of Plymouth. In
the cool early light the town lay distinct along the
shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately
with some public edifices of unknown function on the
uplands; a country-seat of aristocratic aspect showed
itself on one of the heights; on another the tower of
a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were
lines of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as
the stone walls dividing the green fields. The very
iron-clads in the harbor close at hand contributed to
the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale -blue
English sky, already broken with clouds from which
the flush of the sunrise had not quite faded. The
breath of the land came freshly out over the water;
one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls
wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of
the English voices on the tender were pleasant to the
ear as it fussed and scuffled to the ship's side. A
few score of the passengers left her; with their bag-
gage they formed picturesque groups on the tender's
deck, and they set out for the shore waving their hands
and their handkerchiefs to the friends they left cluster-
ing along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. and Mrs.
Leffers bade March farewell, in the final fondness in-
spired by his having coffee with them before they left
the ship ; they said they hated to leave.

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast-
tables were promptly filled, except such as the pas-
sengers landing at Plymouth had vacated; these were
stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commen-
6 79

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

sals placed at others. The seats of the Lefferses were
given to Marches old Ohio friend and his wife. He
tried to engage them in the talk which began to be
general in the excitement of having touched land ; but
they shyly held aloof.

'Some English newspapers had come aboard from the
tug, and there was the usual good-natured adjustment of
the American self-satisfaction among those who had seen
them to the ever^urprising fact that our continent is
apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some
meagre New York stock - market quotations in the pa-
pers ; a paragraph in fine print announced the lynching
of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a strike of
coal-miners in Pennsylvania.

" I always have to get used to it over again," said
Kenby. " This is the twentieth time I have been across,
and I'm just as much astonished as I was the first, to
find out that they don't want to know anything about
us here."

" Oh," said March, " curiosity and the weather both
come from the West. San Francisco wants to know
about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago about
New York, and New York about London ; but curiosity
never travels the other way any more than a hot wave
or a cold wave."

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

" Well, some pressures give out before they reach the
coast on our own side. It isn't an infallibe analogy."

Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste
to take part in the discussion. He gulped it, and broke
out: " Why should they care about us, anyway?"

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

" That isn't sufficient ground. The Chinese are men

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

and brothers ; so are the South-Americans and Central-
Africans and Hawaiians; but we're not impatient for
the latest news ebout them. It's civilization that in-
terests civilization."

" I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold
with the barbarians ?" Bumamy put in, with a smile.

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

" We have that superstition in Chicago," said Buma-
my. He added, still smiling: "About tie New-York-
ers, I mean."

" You're more superstitious in Chicago than I sup-
posed. New York is an anarchy, tempered by vigilance
committees."

" Oh, I don't think you can say that," Kenby cheer-
fully protested, " since the Reformers came in. Look
at our streets !"

" Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and
when we look at them we think we have made a clean
sweep in our manners and morals. But how long do
you think it will be before Tammany will be in the
saddle again ?"

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

" I wish I had your faith ; or I should if I didn't
feel that it is one of the things that help to establish
Tammanys with us. You will see our Tammany in
power after the next election." Kenby laughed in a
large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel
to the other's flame. " New York is politically a medi-
aeval Italian republic, and it's morally a frontier min-
ing-town. Socially, it's — " He stopped as if he could
not say what.

"I think it's a place where you have a very nice

time, papa," said his daughter, and Bumamy smiled

with her ; not because he knew anything about it.

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THEIK SILVEE WEDDING JOUKNEY

Her father went on as if he had not heard her. " It's
as vulgar and crude as mfmej can make it Nothing
counts but money, and as soon as there's enough it
counts for everything. In less than a year you'll have
Tammany in power ; it won't be more than a year till
you'll have it in society."

" Oh no ! Oh no !" came from Kenby. He did not
care much for society, but he vaguely respected it as
the stronghold of the proprieties and the amenities.

" Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in ?"
asked March in the pause Triscoe let follow upon Ken-
by's laugh.

^' There's no reason why it shouldn't be. Society is
as bad as all the rest of it. And what New York is,
politically, morally, and socially, the whole country
wishes to be and tries to be."

There was that measure of truth in the words which
silences ; no one could find just the terms of refutation.

" Well," said Kenby at last, " it's a good thing there
are so many lines to Europe. We've still got the right
to emigrate."

" Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of
our infamous newspapers for exercising a man's right
to live where he chooses. And there is no country iu
Europe — except Turkey or Spain — ^that isn't a better
home for an honest man than the United States."

The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if
he were going to speak. Now he leaned far enough
forward to catch Triscoe's eye, and said, slowly and dis-
tinctly : " I don't know just what reason you have to
feel as you do about the country. I feel differently
about it myself— -perhaps because I fought for it."

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it
even seemed an answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Tris-
coe's cheek flush, and then he doubted its validity.

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as
if to expend a violent impulse upon it. He said, cold-
ly, " I was speaking from that standpoint."

The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt
sorry for him, though he had put himself in the wrong.
His old hand trembled beside his plate, and his head
shook, while his lips formed silent words ; and his shy
wife was sharing his pain and shame.

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the No-
rumbia was to make at Cherbourg, and about what hour
the next day they should all be in Cuxhaven. Miss
Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line
before, and asked several questions. Her father did
not speak again, and after a little while he rose
without waiting for her to make the move from table ;
he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Elt-
win rose at the same time, and !JIarch feared that he
might be going to provoke another defeat in some
way.

Eltwin lifted his voice and said, trying to catch Tris-
coe^s eye, " I think I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I
do beg your pardon."

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the of-
fer of his reparation as distinct as his aggression had
been ; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose daughter
he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she sway-
ed aside to let the two men come together.

" That is all right, Colonel—"

" Major," Eltwin conscientiously interposed.

^' Major " — Triscoe bowed, and he put out his hand
and grasped the hand which had been tremulously ris-
ing toward him. " There canH be any doubt of what we
did, no matter what weVe got."

" No, no !" said the other, eagerly. " That was what
I meant, sir. I donH think as you do ; but I believe that

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

a man who helped to save the country has a right to
think what he pleases about it."

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

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together,
followed by the wife of the one and the daughter of
the other. They saw the young girl making some grace-
ful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went,

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

" Well, I don't know. It was a little too dramatic,
wasn't it ? It wasn't what I should have expected of
real life."

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

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

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That was not the first time General Triscoe had
silenced question of his opinions with the argument he
had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom able to
nse it so aptly. He always found that people suf-
fered his belief in our national degeneration much more
readily when they knew that he had left a diplomatic
position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of
a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union.
Some millions of other men had gone into the war from
the varied motives which impelled men at that time;
but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man of
property and a man of family, in doing so. His family
had improved as time passed, and it was now so old
that back of his grandfather it was lost in antiquity.
This ancestor had retired from the sea and become a
merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his
son established himself as a physician and married the
daughter of a former slave-trader whose social position
was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked to mention
his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to
realize just how anomalous his part in a war against
slavery was ; it heightened the effect of his pose.

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was
brevetted brigadier - general at the close. With this
honor, and with the wound which caused an almost
imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a
rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a
business which was not long in going to pieces in his

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hands. Then the young couple went to live in Paris,
where their daughter was bom, and where the mother
died when the child was ten years old. A little later
his father-in-law died, and Triscoe returned to New
York, where he found the fortune which his daughter
had inherited was much less than he somehow thought
he had a right to expect.

The income from her fortune was enough to live on,
and he did not go back to Paris, where, in fact, things
were not so much to his mind under the Republic as
they had been under the Second Empire. He was still
willing to do something for his country, however, and
he allowed his name to be used on a Citizens' ticket in
his district ; but his provision-man was sent to Congress
instead. Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempt-
ed to convert his shore property into a watering-place ;
but, after being attractively plotted and laid out with
streets and sidewalks, it allured no one to build on it
except the birds and the chipmunks, and he came back
to New York, where his daughter had remained in
school.

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out
tea after she left school ; and she entered upon a series
of dinners, dances, theatre - parties, and receptions of
all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring through
her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had
no duties, but she seldom got out of humor with her
pleasures ; she had some odd tastes of her own, and in
a society where none but the most serious books were
ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good
ones, and had romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely
called bohemian. Her character was never tested by
anything more trying than the fear that her father
might take her abroad to live ; ho had taken her abroad
several times for the summer.

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The dreaded trial did not approach for several years
after she had ceased to be a bud; and then it came
when her father was again willing to serve his country
in diplomacy, either at The Hague, or at Brussels, or
even at Berne. Reasons of political geography pre-
vented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe,
having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the
mission he had expected, decided to go without it. He
was really very fit for both of the offices he had sought,
and so far as a man can deserve public place by pub-
lic service he had deserved it. His pessimism was un-
commonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep
it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early
age when parents suppose themselves still to be mys-
teries to their children. She did not think it neces-
sary ever to explain him to others ; perhaps she would
not have found it possible; and now, after she parted
from Mrs. Eltwin and went to sit down beside Mrs.
March, she did not refer to her father. She said how
sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio ; and what
sort of place did Mrs. March suppose it was where
Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed to have everything
there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs. Elt-
win if they sat on their steps, but she had not quite
dared.

Bumamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's sug-
gestion he took one of the chairs on her other side, to
help her and Miss Triscoe look at the Channel Islands
and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg,
where the Norumbia was to land again. The young
people talked across Mrs. March to each other, and said
how charming the islands were, in their gray-green in-
substantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward,
like airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all

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the nicer not to know just which was which ; but when
the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg he suggested that
they could see better by going round to the other side
of the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when
she had gone off with Bumamy, marked her allegiance
to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life
at sea. There had been an equal unrest when the ship
first sailed; people had first come aboard in the de-
moralization of severing their ties with home, and they
shrank from forming others. Then the charm of the
idle, eventless life grew upon them, and united them
in a fond reluctance from the inevitable end. Now
that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of
disintegration were felt in all the once more repellent
particles. Burnamy and Miss Triscoe, as they hung
upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated to
have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plym-
outh and being at sea again ; they wished that they need
not be reminded of another debarkation by the energy
of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the
hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three Prench
vessels of war that passed, dragging their kraken shapes
low through the level water. At Cherbourg an emo-
tional French tender came out to the ship, very dif-
ferent in her clamorous voices and excited figures from
the steady self-control of the English tender at Plym-
outh ; and they thought the French fortifications much
more on show than the English had been. Nothing
marked their youthful date so much to the Marches,
who presently joined them, as their failure to realize
that in this peaceful sea the great battle between the
Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought The elder
couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact

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which reanimated the spectre of a dreadful war for
themselves ; but they had to pass on and leave the young
people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarka-
tion of the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on the
deck of the tender, with her hands at her waist, and
giving now this side and now that side of her face to
the young men waving their hats to her from the rail
of the ship. Bumamy was not of their number, and
he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving him
finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she
did nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to
profit by the fact. Bumamy spent a great part of it
in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an in-
tolerable resignation to the girPs absence.

" Yes," said March, taking the place Bumamy left
at last, " that terrible patience of youth I"

" Patience ? Folly ! Stupidity ! They ought to be
together every instant! Do they suppose that life is
full of such chances ? Do they think that fate has noth-
ing to do but — '*

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

" Yes ! It's their one chance in a life-time, proba-
bly/'

" Then youVe quite decided that they're in love ?"
He sank comfortably back, and put up his weary legs
on the chair's extension with the conviction that love
had no such joy as that to offer.

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

" Then what more can we ask of them ? And why
do you care what they do or don't do with their chance ?
Why do you wish their love well, if it's that? Is mar-
riage such a very certain good ?"

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'^ It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there
IS. What would our lives have been without it?" she
retorted.

" Oh, we should have got on. It's such a tremen-
dous risk that we ought to go round begging people
to think twice, to count a hundred, or a nonillion, be-
fore they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don't
mind their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying
is a different thing. I doubt if Papa Triscoe would
take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he hadn't se-
lected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a
young lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a
choice. She has her little charm; her little gift of
beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other things that go
with her age and sex ; but what could she do for a fel-
low like Bumamy, who has his way to make, who has
the ladder of fame to climb, with an old mother at the
bottom of it to look after ? You wouldn't want him to
have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had
money, and I doubt if she has much. It's all very
pretty to have a girl like her fascinated with a youth of
his simple traditions ; though Bumamy isn't altogether
pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place
in the very world she belongs to. I don't think it's for
us to promote the affair."

" Well, perhaps you're right," she sighed. " I will
let them alone from this out. Thank goodness, I shall
not have them under my eyes very long !"

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

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind
he meant that she suffered from an illogical disap-
pointment. The young people got through the meal
with no talk that seemed inductive; Bumamy left the
table first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without ap-

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parent discouragement ; she kept on chatting with March
till his wife took him away to their chairs on deck.

There were a few more ships in sight than there were
in mid-ocean; but the late twilight thickened over the
North Sea quite like the night after they left New
York, except that it was colder ; and their hearts turned
to their children, who had been in abeyance for the
week past, with a remorseful pang. " Well," she said,
"I wish we were going to be in New York to-morrow
instead of Hamburg."

" Oh no ! Oh no !" he protested. " Not so bad as
that, my dear. This is the last night, and it's hard to
manage, as the last night always is. I suppose the last
night on earth — "

" Basil !" she implored.

" Well, I won't, then. But what I want is to see a
Dutch lugger. I've never seen a Dutch lugger, and — "

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to
the signal he was silent; though it seemed afterward
that he ought to have gone on talking as if he did not
see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by.
They were walking close together, and she was leaning
forward and looking up into his face while he talked.

" Now," Mrs. March whispered, long after they were
out of hearing, "let us go instantly. I wouldn't for
worlds have them see us here when they get round
again. They would feel that they had to stop and
speak, and that would spoil everything. Come I"

Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and
modestly waited for Miss Triscoe's prompting. He
had not to wait long.

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

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

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" How could you tell that they were — ^taking?''

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

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

" I don't believe it was. The theory in the office was
that he didn't think much of tihem ; but he knows I can
write shorthand, and put things into shape."

"What things?"

" Oh — ideas. He has a notion of trying to come for-
ward in politics. He owns shares in everything but the
United States Senate — ^gas, electricity, railroads, alder-
men, newspapers — and now he would like some Senate.
That's what I think."

She did not quite understand, and she was far from
knowing that this cynic humor expressed a deadlier
pessimism than her father's fiercest accusals of tho
country. " How fascinating it is !" she said, inno-
cently. "And I suppose they all envy your coming
out?"

"In the office?"

" Yes. I should envy them — atayingJ^

Bumamy laughed. " I don't believe they envy me.
It won't be all roses for me — they know that But tiiey
know that I can take care of myself if it isn't." He
remembered something one of his friends in the office
had said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would
feel if he ever tried his beak on him in the belief that
he was soft.

She abruptly left the mere personal question. " And
which would you rather write — poems or those kind of
sketches?"

" I don^t know," said Bumamy, willing to talk of
himself on any terms. "I suppose that prose is the
thing for our time, rather more; but there are things

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you canH say in prose, I used to write a great deal
of verse in college; but I didnH have much luck with
editors till Mr. March took this little piece for Every
Other Week:'

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

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

" Oh I" said the girl. '' What is it about ?"

He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which
he found incredible in a person of his make. " I can
repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs. March."

" Oh, no indeed 1" He said the lines over to her very
simply and well. " They are beautiful — ^beautiful 1"

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

" Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first liter-
ary man — ^the only literary man — I ever talked with.
They must go out — somewhere ! Papa must meet them
at his clubs. But I never do ; and so I'm making the
most of you."

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

She would not mind his mocking. " That day you
spoke about The Maiden Knight, don't you know, I had
never heard any talk about books in that way. I didn't
know you were an author then."

" Well, I'm not much of an author now," he said,
cynically, to retrieve his folly in repeating his poem to
her.

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

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March
thought, too; Every Other Week was such a very good
place that he could not conscientiously neglect any
means of having his work favorably considered there ;

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

if Mrs. March's interest in it would act upon her hus-
band, ought not he to know just how much she thought
of him as a writer ? " Did she like the poem V^

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had
said anything about the poem, but she launched her-
self upon the general current of Mrs. March's liking
for Bumamy. " But it wouldn't do to tell you all she
said!" This was not what he hoped, but he was rich-
ly content when she returned to his personal history.
" And you didn't know any one when you went up to
Chicago from — "

" Tippecanoe ? Not exactly that T wasn't acquaint-
ed with any one in the office, but they had printed some
things of mine, and they were willing to let me try my
hand. That was all I could ask."

" Of course 1 You knew you could do the rest Well,
it is like a romance. A woman couldn't have such an
adventure as that I" sighed the girl.

" But women do !" Bumamy retorted. " There is a
girl writing on the paper now — she's going to do the
literary notices while I'm gone — ^who came to Chicago
from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and
who's made her way single-handed from interviewing
up."

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

" She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too,
though the kind of journalism that women do isn't
the most dignified. And she's one of the best girls I
know, with lots of sense."

" It must be very interesting," said Miss Triscoe,
with little interest in the way she said it " I suppose
you're quite a little community by yourselves."

"On the paper?"

"Yes."

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING J0URNE15

" Well, some of us know one another in the office, but
most of us don't. There's quite a regiment of people
on a big paper. If you'd like to come out," Bumamy
ventured, " perhaps you could get the Woman's Page
to do."

"What's that?"

" Oh, fashion ; and personal gossip about society lead-
ers; and recipes for dishes and diseases; and corre-
spondence on points of etiquette."

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

He laughed reminiscently. " Well, not always. We
had one man who used to do it beautifully — when ho
was sober. The department hasn't had any permanent
head since."

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem
to shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it in
fully. She abruptly left the subject. " Do you know
what time we really get in to-morrow ?"

" About one, I believe — ^there's a consensus of stew-
ards to that effect, anyway." After a pause he asked,
" Are you likely to be in Carlsbad ?"

" We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we
may go on down to Vienna. But nothing is settled yet."

" Are you going direct to Dresden ?"

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

" I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleep-
ingKiar that will get me there by morning : Mr. StoUer
likes zeal. But I hope you'll let me be of use to you
any way I can before we part to-morrow."

" You're very kind. You've been very good already
— to papa." He protested that he had not been at all
good. " But he*s used to taking care of himfielf on the
other side. Oh, it's this side now !'*

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

" So it is ! How strange that seems. It's actually
Europe. But as long as we're at sea we can't realize
it. Don't you hate to have experiences slip through
your fingers ?"

" I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experi-
ences of her own ; they're always other people's."

This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did
not question its truth. He only suggested, " Well,
sometimes they make other people have the experi-
ences."

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too in-
timate or not she left the question. " Do you under-
stand German ?"

" A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated
a sort of beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask
for things."

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

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

She did not answer. " It must be rather late, isn't
it ?" she asked. He let her see his watch, and she said,
" Yes, it's very late," and led the way within. " I must
look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and
T must justify myself for making him let me give up
my maid when we left home ; we expect to get one in
Dresden. Good-night !"

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their cor-
ridor, and wondered whether it would have been a fit
return for her expression of a sense of novelty in him
as a literary man if he had told her that she was the
first young lady he had known who had a maid. The
fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awe him
so much.

The next morning was merely a transitional period,

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THEIK SILVEK WEDDING JOURNEY

full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken life
of the sea and the untried life of the shore. No one
attempted to resimie the routine of the voyage. Peo-
ple went and came between their rooms and the saloons
and the deck, and were no longer careful to take their
own steamer chairs when they sat down for a moment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those
who remained below had to sit on their hard edges, or
on the sofas, which were cumbered with hand-bags and
rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the
bedroom-stewards began to get the steamer trunks out
and pile them in the corridors ; the servants all became
more caressingly attentive ; and people who had left oJBf
settling the amount of the fees they were going to give
anxiously conferred together. The question whether
you ought ever to give the head steward anything press-
ed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby brought only
a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the
head steward as an officer of the ship. March made the
experiment of offering him six marks, and the head
steward took them quite as if he were not an officer
of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the
music, which is the tax levied on all German ships be-
yond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near
that the summer cottages of the little watering-place
showed through the warm drizzle much like the simmier
cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been for the
strange, low sky the Americans might easily have fan-
cied themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out
into the stream where the Nonimbia had dropped an-
chor. People who had brought their hand-baggage with
them from their rooms looked so much safer with it
that people who had left theirs to their stewards had

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to go back and pledge them afresh not to forget it. The
tender came alongside, and the transfer of the heavy
trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that
every one sat down in some other's chair. At last the
trunks were all on the tender, and the bareheaded stew-
ards began to rim down the gangways with the hand-
baggage. " Is this Iloboken ?" March murmured in
his wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something
in the scene like the reversed action of the kinemato-
graph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment
of reunion among the companions of the voyage, the
more intimate for their being crowded together omder
cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dash-
ing rain. Bumamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs.
March recognized Miss Triscoe and her father in their
travel dress ; they were not far from Bumamy's smile,
but he seemied rather to have charge of the Eltwin^,
whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles.
Rose Adding was talking with Kenby, and apparently
asking his opinion of something ; Mrs. Adding sat near
them tranquilly enjoying her son.

Mrs. March made her husband identify their bag-
gage, large and small, and, after he had satisfied her,
he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh count that it
was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble ;
their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard
over it ; his eyes expressed a contemptuous pity for their
anxiety, whose like he must have been very tired of.
He brought their hand-bags into the customs-room at
the station where they landed; and there took a last
leave and a last fee with unexpected cordiality.

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the
distraction which the customs inspectors of all coun-
tries bring to travellers; and again they were united

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during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was
also the restaurant. It was full of strange noises and
figures and odors — the shuffling of feet, the clash of
crockery, the explosion of nervous German voices, mixed
with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars.
Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing
at the door with a letter in his hand and calling out at
regular intervals, " Krahnay, Krahnay I" When March
could bear it no longer he went up to him and shouted,
" Crane ! Crane !" and the man bowed gratefully and
began to cry, " Kren I Kren !" But whether Mr. Crane
got his letter or not he never knew.

People were swarming at the window of the tele-
graph-office, and sending home cablegrams to announce
their safe arrival ; March could not forbear cabling to
his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great
deal of talking, but no laughing, except among the
Americans, and the girls behind the bar who tried to
understand what they wanted, and then served them
with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Ger-
mans, though voluble, were unsmiling, and here on
the threshold of their empire the travellers had their
first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual
with these amiable people.

Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March
where he sat with his wife, and leaned over her son
to ask, " Do you know what lese-majesty is ? Rose is
afraid I've committed it !"

"N"o, I don't," said March. "But it's the unpar-
donable sin. What have you been doing?"

" I asked the official at the door when our train would

start, and when he said at half-past three, I said, * How

tiresome!' Rose says the railroads belong to the state

here, and that if I find fault with the time-table it's

constructive censure of the emperor, and that's lese-

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majesty." She gave way to her mirth, while the boy
studied March's face with an appealing smile.

" Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time,
Mrs. Adding; but I hope it will be a warning to Mrs.
March. She's been complaining of the coffee."

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

" Well, you'll find you're a Gterman, if you like to
say anything disagreeable about the coffee in the res-
taurant of the emperor's railroad station ; the first thing
you know I shall be given three months on your ac-
count."

Mrs. Adding asked : ^' Then they won't punish ladies ?
There, Rose! I'm safe, you see; and you're still a
minor, though you are so wise for your years."

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

" I don't know that I quite like her playing on that
sensitive child," said Mrs. March. " And you've joined
with her in her joking. Go and speak to him I"

The boy was slowly following his mother, with his
head fallen. March overtook him, and he started ner-
vously at the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and then
looked gratefully up into the man's face. March tried
to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he
said : " Oh yes. I understood that. But I got to think-
ing ; and I don't want my mother to take any risks."

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

" Not now, please !" the boy entreated.

"Well, I'll find another chance," March assented.

He looked round and caught a smiling nod from Bur-

namy, who was still with the Eltwins ; the Triscoes were

at a table by themselves ; Miss Triscoe nodded, too, but

her father appeared not to see March. " It's all right

100

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with Rose/' he said, when he sat down again by his
wife ; " but I guess it's all over with Bumamy," and
'he told her what he had seen. " Do you think it came
to any displeasure between them last night? Do you
suppose he offered himself, and she — "

" What nonsense !" said Mrs. March, but she was not
at peace. " It's her father who's keeping her away from
him."

" I shouldn't mind that. He's keeping her away
from us, too." But at that moment Miss Triscoe, as
if she had followed his return from afar, came over
to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to
Dresden that evening, and she was afraid they might
have no chance to see each other on the train or in
Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with
her father ; he found him no more reconciled to Europe
than America.

" They're Goths," he said of the Germans. " I could
hardly get that stupid brute in the telegraph-office to
take my despatch."

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Tris-
coe ; he was not altogether surprised to meet Bumamy
with her now. The young fellow asked if he could be
of any use to him, and then he said he would look him
up in the train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he
walked away with Miss Triscoe he did not seem in a
hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and
she sighed, " Yes, you can see that as far as they're con-
cerned— "

" It's a great pity that there should be parents to
complicate these affairs," he said. "How simple it
would be if there were no parties to them but the lovers !
But nature is always insisting upon fathers and moth-
ers, and families on both sides."

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The long train which they took at last was for the
Norumbia's people alone, and it was of several tran-
sitional and tentative types of ears. Some were still
the old coach-body carriages ; but most were of a strange
corridor arrangement, with the aisle at the side, and the
seats crossing from it, with compartments sometimes
rising to the roof and sometimes rising half-way. No
two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very comfort-
able ; and when the train began to run out through the
little sea-side town into the country the old delight of
foreign travel began. Most of the houses were little
and low and gray, with ivy or flowering vines cov-
ering their walls to their brown -tiled roofs; there
was here and there a touch of N^orthem Gothic in
the architecture; but usually where it was preten-
tious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad
with us a generation ago and is still very bad in
Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar
shapes of Holstein cattle, herded by little girls, with
their hair in yellow pigtails. The gray, stormy sky
hung low, and broke in fitful rains ; but perhaps for the
inclement season of midsimimer it was not very cold.
Flowers were blooming along the embankments and in
the rank green fields with a dogged energy ; in the vari-
ous distances were groups of trees embowering cottages
and even villages, and always along the ditches and
watercourses were double lines of low willows. At the
first stop the train made, the passengers flocked to the
refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the station,
where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries
gave proof that vegetation was in other respects superior
to the elements. But it was not of the profusion of the
sausages, and the ham which openly in slices or covertly
in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German af-

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f ections ; every form of this wae flanked by tall glasses
of beer.

A number of the natives stood by and stared nn-
smiling at the train, which had broken out in a rash
of little American flags at every window. This boy-
ish display, which must have made the Americans them-
selves laugh, if their sense of himior had not been lost
in their impassioned patriotism, was the last expression
of unity among the Norumhia's passengers, and they
met no more in their sea-solidarity. Of their table ac-
quaintance the Marches saw no one except Burnamy,
who came through the train looking for them. He said
he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and
was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car
train leaving Hamburg at seven. He owned to having
seen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven; Mrs.
March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they
were in the same carriage with the Eltwins. He had
got a letter from Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, and he beg-
ged the Marches to let him engage rooms for them at the
hotel where he was going to stay with him.

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses
of him and of others in the odious rivalry to get their
baggage examined first which seized upon all, and in
which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly
struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors.
There was really no such haste ; but none could govern
themselves against the general frenzy. With the porter
he secured March conspired and perspired to win the
attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector. The
officer opened one trunk, and after a glance at it mark-
ed all as passed, and then there ensued a heroic strife
with the porter as to the pieces which were to go to the
Berlin station for their journey next day and the pieces
which were to go to the hotel overnight. At last the

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division was made; the Marches got into a cab of the
first class; and the porter, crimson and steaming at
every pore from the physical and intellectual strain,
went back into the station.

They had got the nimiber of their cab from the police-
man who stands at the door of all large German stations
and supplies the traveller with a metallic check for the
sort of vehicle he demands. They were not proud, but
it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange
city, and when their first-class cab came creaking and
limping out of the rank they saw how wise they had
been, if one of the second class could have been worse.

As they rattled away from the station they saw yet
another kind of turnout, which they were destined to
see more and more in the German lands. It was that
team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which
the women of no other coimtry can see without a sense
of personal insult. March tried to take the himiorous
view, and complained that they had not been offered
the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but
his wife would not be amused. She said that no coun-
try which suffered such a thing could be truly civilized,
though he made her observe that no city in the world,
except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thorough-
ly troUeyed as Hamburg. The hum of the electric-car
was everywhere, and everywhere the shriek of the wires
overhead ; batlike flights of connecting-plates traversed
all the perspectives through which they drove to the
pleasant little hotel they had chosen.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of
the Elbe, where stately white swans were sailing; and
on the other to the new Rathhaus, over the trees that
deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public
garden, where water - proof old women and impervious
nurses sat, and children plaved in the long twilight of

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the sour, rain -soaked summer of the fatherland. It
was all picturesque, and within -doors there was the
novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture
of the Germans and their beds, which after so many
ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain immutably prepos-
terous. They are apparently imagined for the stature
of sleepers who have shortened as they broadened;
their pillows are triangularly shaped to bring the chin
tight upon the breast under the bloated feather bulk
which is meant for covering, and which rises over the
sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neat-
ly buttoned into the upper sheet, with the effect of a
portly waistcoat.

The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of
the uniformed portier, who had met the travellers at
the door, like a glowing vision of the past, and a friend-
ly air diffused itself through the whole house. At the
dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow
hoped, was by no means, bad, they took counsel with
the English-speaking waiter as to what entertainment
Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time
they had drunk their coffee they had courage for the
Circus Renz, which seemed to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed
at the street comer, stopped it and got off the plat-
form, and stood in the street until they were safely
aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling
them up the steps, or knuckling them in the back to
make them move forward. He let them get fairly
seated before he started the car, and so lost the fun
of seeing them lurch and stagger violently and wildly
clutch each other for support. The Germans have so
little sense of humor that probably no one in the car
would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon
the floor. INo one apparently found it droll that the

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conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked
for their fare; no one smiled at their efforts to make
him understand where they wished to go, and he did
not wink at the other passengers in trying to find out
Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did
not remount till the dismounting passenger had taken
time to get well away from it. When the Marches got
into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried
beyond their street, the conductor would not take their
fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went far
to alleviate the inclemency of the climate; it began to
rain as soon as they left the shelter of the car, but a
citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to the Cir-
cus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that
they did not mind the wet, and the thought of his good-
ness embittered March's self-reproach for under-tipping
the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff like a drum-
major's, who left his place at the circus door to get their
tickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow,
and was then as visibly disappointed with the share of
the change returned to him as a child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his dis-
appointment rankling in their hearts. " One ought al-
ways to overpay them," March sighed, " and I will do
it from this time forth ; we shall not be much the poorer
for it. That heyduk is not going to get off with less
than a mark when we come out." As an earnest of
his good faith he gave the old man who showed them
to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he
bought every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered
him at prices fixed by his remorse. " One ought to do
it," he said. " We are of the quality of good geniuses
to these poor souls; we are Fortune — in disguise; we
are money found in the road. It is an accursed system,

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but they are more its victims than we." His wife quite
agreed with him, and with the same good conscience be-
tween them they gave themselves up to the pure joy
which the circus, of all modem entertainments, seems
alone to inspire. The house was full from floor to roof
when they came in, and every one was intent upon the
two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose
drolleries spoke the universal language of circus humor,
and needed no translation into either German or Eng-
lish. They had missed by an event or two the more
patriotic attraction of *• Miss Darlings, the american
Star,'' as she was billed in English, but they were in
time for one of those equestrian performances which
leave the spectator almost exanimate from their pro-
lixity and the pantomimic piece which closed the even-
ing.

This was not given until nearly the whole house had
gone out and stayed itself with beer and cheese and
ham and sausage, in the restaurant which purveys these
light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Ger-
many. When the people came back gorged to the throat,
they sat down in the right mood to enjoy the allegory
of " the Enchantedmountain's Fantasy ; the Moimtain-
episodes; the Highinteresting Sledge - Courses on the
Steep Acclivities ; the Amazing TTp-rush of the thence-
plunging Four Trains, which arrive with Lightning-
swiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-high Mountain
— the Highest Triumph of the To-day's Circus- Art ; the
Sledgejoumey in the Wizardmountain, and the Fairy
Ballet in the Realm of the Ghostprince, with Gold and
Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and
Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen Splendor of Costume."
The Marches were happy in this allegory, and happier
in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent,
and which here appealed with the large flat feet and the

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plain good faces of the coryphees to all that was sim*
plest and sweetest in their natures. They could not
have resisted, if they had wished, that environment of
good-will ; and if it had not been for the disappointed
heyduk, they would have got home from their evening
at the Circus Renz without a pang.

They looked for him everywhere when they came
out, but he had vanished, and they were left with a
regret which, if unavailing, was not too poignant In
spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release
from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers, which
they analyzed as the psychical revulsion from the strain
of too great interest in them. Mrs. March declared that
for the present, at least, she wanted Europe quite to
themselves ; and she said that not even for the pleasure
of seeing Bumamy and Miss Triscoe come into their
box together would she have suffered an American tres-
pass'upon their exclusive possession of the Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for
the first time in Hamburg, and she meant, if unremit-
ting question could bring out the truth, to know why
she had not met any others. She had read much of the
prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who
would try to push her off the sidewalk, till they realized
that she was an American woman, and would then sub-
mit to her inflexible purpose of holding it But she
had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and
nothing of the kind had happened to her, perhaps be-
cause she had hardly yet walked a block in the city
streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very
few officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next
morning, by the young German friend who came in to
see the Marches at breakfast. He said Hamburg had
been so long a free republic that the presence of a

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large imperial garrison was distasteful to the people,
and, as a matter of fact, there were very few soldiers
quartered there, whether the authorities chose to in-
dulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in
a joyful flutter of spirits, for he had just the day be-
fore got his release from military service. He gave
them a notion of what the rapture of a man reprieved
from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy
in the ill health which had got him his release as if it
had been the greatest blessing of Heaven. He bubbled
over with smiling regrets that he should be leaving his
home for the first stage of the journey which he was
to take in search of strength just as they had come, and
he pressed them to say if there were not something that
he could do for them.

" Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness sur-
prising to her husband, who could think of nothing;
" tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was in
Hamburg. My husband has always had a great pas-
sion for him and wants to look him up everywhere.**

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Ham-
burg, and the young man had apparently never known
it His face fell; he wished to make Mrs. March be-
lieve that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there ;
but she was firm; and when he had asked among the
hotel people he came back gladly owning that he was
wrong, and that the poet used to live in Konigstrasse,
which was very near by, and where they could easily
know the house by his bust set in its front. The portier
and the head-waiter shared his ecstasy in so easily oblig-
ing the friendly American pair, and joined him in mi-
nutely instructing the driver when they shut them into
their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only
laughing face they should see in the serious German

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Empire ; just as they did not know that it rained there
every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with
the unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather
would be fine, they bade their driver be very slow in
taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he should
by no means miss Heine^s dwelling, and he duly stop-
ped in front of a house bearing the promised bust
They dismoimted in order to revere it more at their
ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than
the sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have im-
agined in his crudest moment, to be that of the Ger-
man Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock, whom
Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact, it was here that the good, much-forgotten
Klopstock dwelt, when he came home to live with a
comfortable pension from the Danish government ; and
the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about
among the neighbors in Konigstrasse for some manner
of house where Heine might have lived; they would
have been willing to accept a flat, or any sort of two-
pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the
anxiety of the strangers; but they were not so much
moved as neighbors in Italy would have been. There
was no eager and smiling sympathy in the little crowd
that gathered to see what was going on ; they were pa-
tient of question and kind in their helpless response,
but they were not gay. To a man they had not heard
of Heine; even the owner of a sausage-and-blood-pud-
ding shop across the way. had not heard of him; the
clerk of a stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's
had heard of him, but he had never heard that he lived
in Konigstrasse ; he never had heard he lived in Ham-
burg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into
their carriage and drove sadly away, instructing their

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driver with tho rigidity which their limited German
favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front
escape him. He promised, and took his course out
through Konigstrasse, and suddenly they found them-
selves in a world of such eld and quaintness that they
forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen
had done. They were in steep and narrow streets, that
crooked and turned with no apparent purpose of lead-
ing anywhere, among houses that looked down upon
them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed
windows of their timber-laced gables. The fa5ades,with
their lattices stretching in bands quite across them, and
with their steep roofs climbing high in successions of
blinking dormers, were more richly mediseval than any-
thing the travellers had ever dreamed of before, and they
feasted themselves upon the un imagined picturesqueness
with a leisurely minuteness which brought responsive
gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set
ajar; shop-doors were darkened by curious figures from
within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was inter-
rupted by their progress. They could not have said
which delighted them more — the houses in the imme-
diate foreground, or the sharp, high gables in the per-
spectives and the background; but all were like the
painted scenes of the stage, and they had a pleasant
difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in
some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the im-
pression which Hamburg made by her much-troUeyed,
Bostonian effect ; by the decorous activity and Parisian
architecture of her business streets; by the turmoil of
her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of
her shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness,
that picturesqueness of the past, which embodied the
spirit of the old Hanseatic city and seemed the expres-
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Bion of the home-side of her history. The sense of thia
gained strength from such slight study of her annals as
they afterward made^ and assisted the digestion of some
morsels of tough statistics. In the shadow of those
Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the
greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had
a romantic glamour ; and the fact that in the four years
from 1870 till 1874 a quarter of a million emigrants
sailed on her ships for the United States seemed to
stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval
streets through the whole shabby length of Third Ave-
nue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of
commercial solidarity, that March went to have a look
at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful new Rath-
haus. It was not imdergoing repairs, it was too new
for that ; but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled
the function of a public edifice in withholding its en-
tire interest from the stranger. He could not get into
the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him,
and when he stepped within it rose at him with a roar
of voices and of feet like the New York Stock Ex-
change. The spectacle was not so frantic ; people were
not shaking their fists or fingers in one another^s noses ;
but they were all wild in the tamer German way, and
he was glad to mount from the Bourse to the poor little
art gallery up-stairs, and to shut out its clamor. He
was not so glad when he looked round on these his
first examples of modem German art. The custodian
led him gently about and said which things were for
sale, and it made his heart ache to see how bad they
were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not
buy any of them.

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In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the
irresponsible ease of people ticketed through, and the
steamship company had still the charge of their bag-
gage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic
(where they had decided to break the long pull to Carls-
bad) all the anxieties of European travel, dimly re-
membered from former European days, offered them-
selves for recognition. A porter vanished with their
hand - baggage before they could note any trait in him
for identification ; other porters made away with their
trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his
tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English,
had to help him find the pieces in the baggage-room,
curiously estranged in a mountain of alien boxes. One
official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as
much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him
an illegible scrap of paper which recorded their num-
ber and destination. The interpreter and the porters
took their fees with a professional effect of dissatis-
faction, and he went to wait with his wife amid the
smoking and eating and drinking in the restaurant.
They burst through with the rest when the doors were
opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the porter
with their hand-bags as he ran down the platform, still
bent upon escaping them, and brought him to bay at
last in a car whore he had got very good seats for them,
and sank into their places, hot and humiliated by their

needless tumult.

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As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect and
renewed a youthful joy in some of the long-estranged
facts. The road was rougher than the roads at home;
but for much less money they had the comfort, without
the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-
class carriage. Mrs. March had expected to be used
with the severity on the imperial railroads which she
had failed to experience from the military on the Ham-
burg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the
whole management toward her. Her fellow-travellers
were not lavish of their rights, as Americans are ; what
they got, that they kept; and in the run from Ham-
burg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that
no German, however young or robust, dreams of offer-
ing a better place, if he has one, to a lady in grace to
her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to
secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the
end of that stage. But if they appealed to their fellow-
travellers for information about changes, or stops, or
any of the little facts that they wished to make sure of,
they were enlightened past possibility of error. At the
point where they might have gone wrong the explana-
tions were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed
that their anxieties had not been forgotten. She said
she could not see how any people could be both so selfish
and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of
saying something offensive :

" You women are so pampered in America that you
are astonished when you are treated in Europe like the
mere himian beings you are."

She answered with unexpected reasonableness : " Yes,
there's something in that; but when the Germans have
taugh*t us how despicable we are as women, why do they
treat us so well as human beings V^

This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden back-

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ward a long way, and at last, within an hour of Leipsic,
had got a seat confronting him. The darkness had now
hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few sim-
ple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long
levels, densely wooded with the precise, severely dis-
ciplined German forests, and checkered with fields of
grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain that from
time to time varied the thin sunshine. The villages
and peasants^ cottages were notably few ; but there was
here and there a classic or a Gothic villa, which, at one
point, an English-speaking young lady turned from her
Tauchnitz novel to explain as the seat of some country
gentleman ; the land was in large holdings, and this ac-
counted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.

She then said that she was a German teacher of
English, in Hamburg, and was going home to Potsdam
for a visit. She seemed like a German girl out of The
Initials, and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried
to invest herself with some romantic interest as an
American. She failed to move the girPs fancy, even
after she had bestowed on her an immense bimch of
roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had
sent to them just before they left their hotel. She
failed, later, on the same ground with the pleasant-
looking English woman who got into their carriage at
Magdeburg and talked over the London Illustrated
News with an English-speaking Eraulein in her com-
pany; she readily accepted the fact of Mrs. March's
nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, ap-
parently; and when she left the train she left Mrs.
March to recall with fond regret the old days in Italy
when she first came abroad, and could make a whole
carriageful of Italians break into ohs and ahs by say-
ing that she was an American, and telling how far she
had come across the sea.

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'^ Yes," March assented, " but that was a great while
ago, and Americans were much rarer than they are
now in Europe. The Italians are so much more sym-
pathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw
that you wanted to impress them. Heaven knows how
little they cared! And then you were a very pretty
young girl in those days ; or, at least, I thought so.*'

"Yes," she sighed, "and now Fm a plain old
woman."

" Oh, not quite so had as that."

" Yes, I am ! Do you think they would have cared
more if it had been Miss Triscoe ?"

"Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl.
They would have found her much more their ideal of
the American woman ; and even she would have had to
have been here thirty years ago."

She laughed a little ruefully. " Well, at any rate,
I should like to know how Miss Triscoe would have
affected them."

" I should much rather know what sort of life that
English woman is living here with her Gferman hus-
band; I fancied she had married rank. I could im-
agine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town,
from the way she clung to her Illustrated News, and
explained the pictures of the royalties to her friend.
There is romance for you !"

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after
their five hours' journey, and as in a spell of their
travelled youth they drove up through the academic
old town, asleep imder its dimly clouded sky, and si-
lent except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets
with their feline purr, and broke at times into a long,
shrill caterwaul. A sense of the past imparted itself
to the well-known encounter with the portier and the
head - waiter at the hotel door, to the paym"ent of the

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driver, to the endeavor of the secretary to have them
take the most expensive rooms in the house, and to
his compromise upon the next most, where they found
themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and
bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boys in
dress-coats too large for them. The spell was deepened
by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his con-
sciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was
missing. This linked him more closely to the travel of
other days, and he spent the next forenoon in a tele-
graphic search for the estray, with emotions tinged by
the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that
since it was somewhat in the keeping of the state rail-
way it would be finally restored to him.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked
into a large square of aristocratic physiognomy, and
of a Parisian effect in architecture, which afterward
proved -characteristic of the town, if not quite so char-
acteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling
itself Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray
tending to the pale yellow of the Tauchnitz editions
with which the place is more familiarly associated in
the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather
more sombre than it might have been if the weather had
been fair; but a quiet rain was falling dreamily that
morning, and the square was provided with a fountain
which continued to dribble in the rare moments when
the rain forgot itself. The place was better shaped
than need be in that sunless land by the German elms
that look like ours, and it was sufficiently stocked with
German statues that look like no others. It had a monu-
ment, too, of the sort with which German art has every-
where disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war
with France. These monuments, though they are so
very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records of the only

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war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against
a foreign foe, but they are as tiresome as all such me-
morial pomps must be. It is not for the victories of a
people that any other people can care. The wars come
and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad
wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are
of one effect in death and sorrow, and their fame is an
offence to all men not concerned in them till time has
softened it to a memory

"Of old, unhappy, far-off things.
And battles long ago."

It was for some such reason that while the Marches
turned with instant satiety from the swelling and strut-
ting sculpture which celebrated the Leipsic heroes of
the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war
of 1813: and after their noonday dinner they drove
willingly, in a pause of the rain, out between yellow-
ing harvests of wheat and oats to the field where Na-
poleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians, and Prus-
sians (it always took at least three nations to beat the
little wretch) fourscore years before. Yet even there
Mrs. March was really more concerned for the sparsity
of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modem char-
acter of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from
their loyal function; and March was more taken with
the notion of the little gardens which his guide told
him the citizens could have in the suburbs of Leipsic
and enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes,
lie saw certain of these gardens in groups, divided by
low, unenvious fences, and sometimes furnished with
summer-houses, where the tenant could take his pleas-
ure in the evening air with his family. The guide said
he had such a garden himself, at a rent of seven dollars

a year, where he raised vegetables and flowers and spent

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his peaceful leisure ; and March fancied that on the sim-
ple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him
a glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging
than in their character of victors over either the First
or the Third Napoleon. But probably they would not
have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on
making themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at
last prevails over nationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself;
but though the guide was imaginably liberated to a
cosmopolitan conception of things by three years' ser-
vice as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the
language, he might not have risen to this. He would
have tried, for he was a willing and kindly soul, though
he was not a valet de place by profession. There seem-
ed, in fact, but one of that useless and amusing race
(which is everywhere falling into decay through the
rivalry of the perfected Baedeker) left in Leipsic, and
this one was engaged, so that the Marches had to de-
volve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper of
a small restaurant He gladly abandoned his business
to the care of his wife, in order to drive handsomely
about in his best clothes, with strangers who did not
exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal to
do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat
when they dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall
from its pocket his prophylactic flask of brandy, which
broke with a loud crash on the marble floor in the pres-
ence of several masterpieces and perfumed the whole
place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of
Luke Kranach, who seemed the only German painter
worth looking at when there were any Dutch or Italian
pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and
nature of the Kranachs, and remembered afterward
only the shattered fragments of the brandv-flask, just

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how they looked on the floor, and the fumes — ^how they
smelt! — ^that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the verac-
ities against what they were doing; but the madness
of sight - seeing, which spoils travel, was on them, and
they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their
ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so
well. They spared themselves nothing that they had
time for that day, and they felt falsely guilty for their
omissions, as if they really had been duties to art and
history which must be discharged, like obligations to
one's maker and one's neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of
the beautiful old Rathhaus, and they were sensible of
something like a genuine emotion in passing the famous
and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is
redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to
March in his quality of editor ; and they could not fail
of an impression of the quiet beauty of the town, with
its regular streets of houses breaking into suburban
villas of an American sort, and intersected with many
canals, which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly
navigated by pleasure-boats, and contributed to the gen-
eral picturesqueness by their frequent bridges even dur-
ing the drizzle. There seemed to be no churches to do,
and as it was a Sunday the galleries were so early closed
against them that they were making a virtue as well as
a pleasure of the famous scene of Napoleon's first great
defeat

By a concert between their guide and driver their
carriage drew up at the little inn by the road -side,
which is also a museum stocked with relics from the
battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it.
Old muskets, old swords, old shoes, and old coats, trum-
pets, drums, gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon-

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ballfl, grape-shot, and all the murderous rubbish which
battles come to at last, with proclamations, autographs,
caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of
all the other generals engaged, and miniatures and
jewels of their womenkind, filled room after room,
through which their owner vaunted his way, with a
loud pounding voice and a bad breath. When he wish-
ed them to enjoy some gross British satire or clumsy
German gibe at Bonaparte's expense, and put his face
close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible
that March left the place with a profound if not a rea-
soned regret that the French had not won the battle of
Leipsic. He walked away musing pensively upon the
traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of history when a
breath could so sway him against his convictions; but
even after he had cleansed his lungs with some deep
respirations he found himself still a Bonapartist in the
presence of that stone on the rising ground where Na-
poleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and
see his empire slipping through his blood-stained fin-
gers. It was with difficulty that he could keep from
revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the
stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not
make out then or afterward whether the habiliments
represented were really Napoleon's or not, and they
might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly's.

While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes
he was startled by the apparition of a man climbing
the little slope from the opposite quarter and advancing
toward them. He wore the imperial crossed by the
pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much
the worse for them, and March had the shiver of a
fine moment in which he fancied the Third Napoleon
rising to view the scene where the First had looked his
coming ruin in the face.

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"Why, it'8 Miss Triscoe!'* cried his wife, and be-
fore March had noticed the approach of another figure
the elder and the younger lady had rushed upon each
other and encountered with a kiss. At the same time
the visage of the last emperor resolved itself into the
face of General Triscoe, who gave March his hand in a
more tempted greeting.

The ladies began asking each other of their lives
since their parting two days before, and the men stroll-
ed a few paces away toward the distant prospect of
Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble
stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the
horizon.

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Ger-
many than he had been on first stepping ashore at Cux-
haven. He might still have been in a pout with his
own country, but as yet he had not made up with any
other ; and he said : " What a pity Napoleon didn't
thrash the whole dunderheaded lot ! His empire would
have been a blessing to them, and they would have had
some chance of being civilized under the French. All
this unification of nationalities is the great humbug
of the century. Every stupid race thinks it's happy
because it's united, and civih'zation has been set back
a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring
the unions about ; and more wars will have to be fought
to keep them up. What a farce it is ! What's become
of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswi^Holstein,
or the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians
in Savoy?"

March had thought something like this himself, but
to have it put by General Triscoe made it offensive. " I
don't know. Isn't it rather quarrelling with the course
of human events to oppose accomplished facts? The
unifications were bound to be, just as the separations

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before them were. And so far they have made for
peace^ in Europe at least, and peace is civilization.
Perhaps after a great many ages people will come
together through their real interest, the human in-
terests; but at present it seems as if nothing but
a romantic sentiment of patriotism can unite them.
By - and - bv they may find that there is nothing in
it."

** Perhaps," said the general, discontentedly. " I
don't see much promise of any kind in the future."

" Well, I don't know. When you think of the solid
militarism of Germany, you seem remanded to the most
hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you think
nothing can break such a force; but my guide says
that even in Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the
other parties, and the army is the great field of tho
Socialist propaganda. The army itself may be shaped
into the means of democracy — even of peace."

" You're very optimistic," said Triscoe, curtly. *' As
I read the signs, we are not far from imiversal war.
In less than a year we shall make the break ourselves
in a war with Spain." He looked very fierce as he
prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato
glances.

" Well, I'll allow that if Tammany comes in this
year we shall have war with Spain. You can't ask
more than that, General Triscoe?"

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word
of the battle of Leipsic, or of the impersonal interests
which it suggested to the men. For all these, they
might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs
on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which
seemed now of geological remoteness. The girl ac-
counted for not being in Dresden by her father's hav-
ing decided not to go through Berlin, but to come by

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way of Leipsic, which he thought they had better see ;
they had come without stopping in Hamburg. They
had not enjoyed Leipsic much ; it had rained the whole
day before, and they had not gone out. She asked when
Mrs. March was going on to Carkbad, and Mrs. March
answered, the next morning; her husband wished to be-
gin his cure at once.

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad
would do her father any good; and Mrs. March dis-
creetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms.

" Oh, he hasn't any. But I know he can't be well —
with his gloomy opinions."

" They may come from his liver," said Mrs. March.
"Nearly everything of that kind does. I know that
Mr. March has been terribly depressed at times, and
the doctor said it was nothing but his liver ; and Carls-
bad is the great place for that, you know."

" Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he
doesn't like Dresden. It isn't very far, is it?"

They referred to Mrs. March's Baedeker together,
and found that it was five hours.

"Yes, that is what I thought," said Miss Triscoe,
with a carelessness which convinced Mrs. March she
had looked up the fact already.

" If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms
for you at our hotel. We're going to Pupp's ; most of
the English and Americans go to the hotels on the Hill,
but Pupp's is in the thick of it in the lower town; and
it's very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he's been there often.
Mr. Burnamy is to get our rooms."

" I don't suppose I can get papa to go," said Miss

Triscoe, so insincerely that Mrs. March was sure she

had talked over the different routes to Carlsbad with

Burnamy — ^probably on the way from Cuxhaven. She

looked up from digging the point of her umbrella in

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the ground. " You didn't meet him here this mom-

ing?"

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she
respected in asking, " Has Mr. Bnmamy been here ?"

"He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin when we
did, and they all decided to stop over a day. They
left on the twelve-o'clock train to-day."

Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not
to let the facts betray themselves by chance, and she
treated them as of no significance.

" No, we didn't see him,'' she said, carelessly.

The two men came walking slowly toward them, and
Miss Triscoe said, " We're going to Dresden this even-
ing, but I hope we shall meet somewhere, Mrs. March."

" Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe ;
they can't; it's so little!"

" Agatha," said the girl's father, " Mr. March tells
me that the museum over there is worth seeing."

" Well," the girl assented, and she took a winning
leave of the Marches and moved gracefully away with
her father.

" I should have thought it was Agnes," said Mrs.
March, following them with her eyes before she turned
upon her husband. "Did he tell you Bumamy had
been here? Well, he has! He has just gone on to
Carlsbad. He made those poor old Eltwins stop over
with him, so he could be with Aer."

"Did she say that?"

" No, but of course he did."

"Then it's all settled?"

" No, it isn't settled. It's at the most interesting
point."

" Well, don't read ahead. You always want to look
at the last page."

" You were trying to look at the last page your-

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self," she retorted, and she would have liked to punish
him for his complex dishonesty toward the afiFair; but
upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she
made him agree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father
to Carlsbad was only a question of time.

They parted heart's - friends with their ineffectual
guide, who was affectionately grateful for the few
marks they gave him at the hotel door; and they were
in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther room
when they went down to supper. The waiter, much
distracted from their own service by his duties to it,
told them it was the breakfast party of students which
they had heard beginning there about noon. The revel-
lers had now been some six hours at table, and he said
they might not rise before midnight ; they had just got
to the toasts, which were apparently set to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in the
impression of the university town. They pervaded the
place, and decorated it with their fantastic personal
taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps caps
of green, white, red, and blue, but, above all, blue.
They were not easily distinguishable from the bicy-
clers who were holding one of the dull festivals of
their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were
sometimes both students and bicyclers. As bicyclers
they kept about in the rain, which they seemed not to
mind ; so far from being disheartened, they had spirits
enough to take one another by the waist at times and
waltz in the square before the hotel. At one moment
of the holiday some chiefs among them drove away
in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes sat covered
with badges and medals ; another who went by the ho-
tel streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his
side was bespattered with small knots and ends of them,
as if he had been in an explosion of ribbons somewhere.

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It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was as
tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and
bicyclers at. home.

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity
concerning their different colors and different caps, and
she tried to make her husband find out what they sev-
erally meant; he pretended a superior interest in the
nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms
that they were not content with its gratification in their
inunense army, but indulged it in every pleasure and
employment of civil life. He estimated, perhaps not
very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Ger-
many wore citizens* dress; and of all functionaries he
found that the dogs of the women-and-dog teams alone
had no distinctive dress; even the women had their
peasant costume.

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which
they went out of the city to see after supper, along
with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an hour^s interval
of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley ; and with
the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his
service with the eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled
chairs, and renewed their associations with the great
Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from them. This
was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by
a woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right
means of doing a German fair; but it was something
to have his chair pushed by a slender young girl, whose
stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of the
lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should
reckon the common hire, while the man took the com-
mon tip. They made haste to leave the useful aspects
of the fair, and had themselves tnmdled away to the
Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected some-
thing like the agreeable corruptions of the Midway
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Plaisance. The idea of her colonial progress with
which Gennany is trying to affect the home-keeping
imagination of her people was illustrated by an en-
campment of savages from her Central - African pos-
sessions. They were getting their supper at the mo-
ment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half
naked, around the fires under the kettles, and shivering
from the cold, but they were not very characteristic of
the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an old
man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife
in his hand and began to chase a boy round the camp.
The boy was lighter-footed, and easily outran the sage,
who tripped at times on his blanket. None of the other
Central- Africans seemed to care for the race, and with-
out waiting for the event, the American spectators or-
dered themselves trundled away to another idle feature
of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves with
the image of Old Leipsic.

This was so faithfully studied from the past in its
narrow streets and Qt)thic houses that it was almost as
picturesque as the present epoch in the old streets of
Hamburg. A drama had just begun to be represented
on a platform of the public square in front of a four-
teenth-century beer-house, with people talking from the
windows round, and revellers in the costume of the
period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in
the open air. Their eating and drinking were genuine,
and in the midst of it a real rain began to pour down
upon them, without affecting them any more than if
they had been Germans of the nineteenth century. But
it drove the Americans to a shelter from which they
could not see the play, and when it held up they made
their way back to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of
whom were happy beyond the sober wont of the f ather-

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land. The conductor took a special interest in his tipsy
passengers, trying to keep them in order, and genially
entreating them to be quiet when they were too ob-
streperous. From time to time he got some of them
off, and then, when he remounted the car, he appealed
to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with
an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange
to the unjoyous physiognomy of the German Empire,
failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble
from the experiences and impressions of the day some
facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious
observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that
their guide had said house -rent was very low. He
generalized from the guide's content with his fee that
the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became
quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's
clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that
the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather
pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as
the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex.
He was able to note, rather more freshly, that with
all their kindness the Germans were a very nervous
people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave
way to an agitation which indeed quickly passed, but
was violent while it lasted. Several times that day he
had seen encounters between the portier and guests at
the hotel which promised ^nolence, but which ended
peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-
time was solved. The encounters always left the por-
tier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with
a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned himself
after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling,
in which he could take no exercise. " It is a life of
excitements, but not of movements," he explained to

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March; and when he learned where he was going, he
regretted tliat he could not go to Carlsbad, too. " For
sugar?" he asked^ as if there were overmuch of it in
his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, " No ;
liver."

"Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to
get on common ground with him.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been
a fine morning in America. Its beauty was scarcely
sullied, even subjectively, by the telegram which the
portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying
that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and
their spirits were as light as the gay little clouds which
blew about in the sky, when their train drew out in
the simshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all
the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly traeger had done his
best to get them the worst places in a non- smoking
compartment, but had succeeded so poorly that they
were very comfortable, with no companions but a
mother and daughter, who spoke German in soft, low
tones together. Their compartment was pervaded by
tobacco fumes from the smokers; but as these were
twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair;
and after March had got a window open it did not mat-
ter, really.

He asked leave of the strangers in his Glerman, and
they consented in theirs; but he could not master the
secret of the window-catch, and the elder lady said in
English, " Let me show you," and came to his help.
The occasion for explaining that they were Americans
and accustomed to different car-windows was so tempt-
ing that Mrs. March could not forbear, and the other
ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Per-
haps they were the more affected because it presently

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appeared that they had cjoiisins in 'N"ew York whom she
knew of, and that they were acquainted with an Amer-
ican family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life
likes to do these things handsomely, and it easily turned
out that this was a family of intimate friendship with
the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken, abolished
all strangeness between the travellers ; and they entered
into a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences,
from which it seemed that the objects and interests of
cultivated people in Berlin were quite the same as those
of cultivated people in New York. Each of the parties
to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their
respective civilizations ; they wished rather to ascribe a
greater charm and virtue to the alien conditions; and
they acquired such merit with one another that when
the German ladies got out of the train at Franzenbad
the mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding
footstool which she had admired. In fact, she left her
with it clasped to her breast, and bowing speechless
toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude.

" That was very pretty of her, my dear," said March.
" You couldn't have done that."

" No," she confessed ; '* I shouldn't have had the
courage. The courage of my emotions," she added,
thoughtfully.

" Ah, that's the difference ! A Berliner could do it,
and a Bostonian couldn't. Do yon think it so much
better to have the courage of your convictions?"

" I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and
less certain of everything that I used to be sure of."

He laughed, and then he said, "I was thinking
how, on our wedding journey, long ago, that Gray
Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered you a
rose."

"Well?"

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" That was to your pretty youth. Now tte gracious
stranger gives you a folding stool."

" To rest my poor old feet. Well, I would rather
have it than a rose now."

"You bent toward her at just the slant you had
when you took the flower that time; I noticed it. I
didn^t see that you looked so very different. To be
sure, the roses in your cheeks have turned into ro-
settes j but rosettes are very nice, and they^re much
more permanent ; I prefer them ; they will keep in any
climate."

She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh.
" Yes, our age caricatures our youth, doesn't it ?"

" I don't think it gets much fun out of it," he as-
sented.

" No ; but it can't help it. I used to rebel against
it when it first began. I did enjoy being young."

" You did, my dear," he said, taking her hand ten-
derly; she withdrew it, because though she could bear
his sympathy, her New England nature could not bear
its expression. " And so did I ; and we were both
young a long time. Travelling brings the past back,
don't you think? There at that restaurant, where we
stopped for dinner — "

'^^ Yes, it was charming ! Just as it used to be !
With that white cloth, and those tall shining bottles
of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the dinner in
courses, and that young waiter who spoke English,
and was so nice ! I'm never going home ; you may, if
you like."

" You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars ;
and you said that our railroad restaurants were quite
as good as the European."

" I had to do that. But I knew better ; they don't
begin to be."

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"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel
is a good deal alike everywhere. It's the expression
of the common civilization of the world. When I came
out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and
then found that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I
wasn't sure whether I was at home or abroad. And
when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this train
which had been baking in the sun for us outside the
station, I didn't know but I was back in the good old
Fitchburg depot. To be sure, Wallenstein wasn't as-
sassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at Eger,
and so that came to the same thing. It's these con-
founded fifty-odd years. I used to recollect every-
thing."

He had got up and was looking out of the window
at the landscape, which had not grown less amiable in
growing rather more slovenly since they had crossed
the Saxon border into Bohemia. All the morning and
early afternoon they had run through lovely levels of
harvest, where men were cradling the wheat and wom-
en were binding it into sheaves in the narrow fields
between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger,
there was something more picturesque and less thrifty
in the farming among the low hills which they grad-
ually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a moim-
tain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations
were shabbier ; there was an indefinable touch of some-
thing Southern in the scenery and the people. Lilies
were rocking on the sluggish reaches of the streams,
and where the current quickened tall wheels were lift-
ing water for the fields in circles of brimming and
spilling pockets. Along the embankments, where a
new track was being laid, barefooted women were at
work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yel-
low-haired girls were lugging large white-headed babies^

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and watching the train go by. At an up grade where
it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the
children the pfennigs which had been left over from
the passage in Grermany, and he pleased himself with
his bounty, till the question whether the children could
spend the money forced itself upon him. He sat down
feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician
who had tricked them with false wealth; but he kept
his remorse to himself, and tried to interest his wife
in the difference of social and civic ideal expressed in
the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,
which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to
outlean himself, and now in Austria entreated him not
to outbow himself. She refused to share in the specu-
lation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by
the placarded prayer in the wash-room to the Messrs.
Travellers not to take away the soap ; and suddenly he
felt himself as tired as she looked, with that sense of
the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one
who profits by travel.

They found Bumamy expecting them at the station
in Carlsbad, and she scolded him like a mother for
taking the trouble to meet them, while she kept back
for the present any sign of knowing that he had stayed
over a day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as
affectionately glad to see her and her husband as she
could have wished, but she would have liked it better
if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did
not, and it seemed to her that he was holding her at
arm's-length in his answers about his employer. He
would not say how he liked his work, or how he liked
Mr. StoUer; he merely said that they were at Pupp's
together, and that he had got in a good day's work
already; and since he would say no more, she con-
tented herself with that.

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The long drive from the station to the hotel was by
streets that wound down the hill-side like those of an
Italian mountain town, between gay stuccoed houses
of Southern rather than of Northern architecture ; and
the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a
turn of the road which brought into view a colossal
crucifix planted against a curtain of dark-green foliage
on the brow of one of the wooded heights that sur-
rounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of
the Tepl, the hill-fed torrent that brawls through the
little city under pretty bridges within walls of solid
masonry, they found themselves in almost the only
vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cos-
mopolitan world. Germans in every manner of mis-
fit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines, with tight,
corkscrew curls on their temples under their black
velvet derbys ; Austrian officers in tight corsets ; Greek
priests in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Rus-
sians in caftans and Cossacks in Astrakhan caps ac-
cented the more homogeneous masses of western Euro-
peans, in which it would have been hard to say which
were English, French, or Italians. Among the vividly
dressed ladies, some were imaginably Parisian from
their chic costumes, but they might easily have been
Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans,
who might have passed unknown in the perfection of
their dress, gave their nationality away in the flat,
wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of
the innumerable feet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among
the promenaders going and coming between the rows
of pollard locusts on one side and the bright walls of
the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables
served by pretty, bareheaded girls who ran to and from

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the restaurants across the way. On both sides flashed
and glittered the little shops full of silver, glass, jew-
elry, terra-cotta figurines, wood - carvings, and all the
idle frippery of watering-place traffic They suggested
Paris and they suggested Saratoga, and then they were
of Carlsbad and of no place else in the world, as the
crowd which might have been that of other cities at
certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in
its habitual effect

" Do you like it ?" asked Bumamy, as if he owned
the place, and Mrs. March saw how simple-hearted he
was in his reticence, after all. She was ready to bless
him when they reached the hotel and found that his
interest had got them the only rooms left in the house.
This satisfied in her the passion for size which is at
the bottom of every American heart, and which per-
haps above all else marks us the youngest of the peo-
ples. We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own
things, but we are not ungenerous, and when we go
to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we are
magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its alto-
gether different way, was larger than any hotel at
Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamy told her
that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day
in the height of the season, she was personally proud
of it.

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel,
while the secretary led March off to look at the rooms
reserved for them, and Bumamy hospitably turned the
revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda
where the names of the guests were put up. They
were of all nations, but there were so many New-
Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thai, and
stem, and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a
cyclorama of the signs on Broadway. A large man of

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unmistakable American make, but with so little that
was of New England or New York in his presence
that she might not at once have thought him Ameri-
can, lounged toward them with a quill toothpick in
the comer of his mouth. lie had a jealous blue eye
into which he seemed trying to put a friendly light;
his straight mouth stretched into an involuntary smile
above his tawny chin-beard, and he wore his soft hat
so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the
crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect
of being uncovered.

At his approach Bumamy turned, and with a flush
said: "Oh! Let me introduce Mr. StoUer, Mrs.
March."

StoUer took his toothpick out of his mouth and
bowed; then he seemed to remember and took off his
hat. " You see Jews enough here to make you feel
at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got
some of 'em in Chicago, too, I guess. This young
man " — ^he twisted his head toward Bumamy — " found
you easy enough ?"

" It was very good of him to meet us," Mrs. March
began. " We didn't expect — "

" Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his tooth-
pick back and his hat on. " We'd got through for the
day; my doctor won't let me work all I want to here.
Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me.
Well, he wants to go to a good doctor first. You can't
go and drink these waters hit or miss. I found that
out before I came."

" Oh no !" said Mrs. March, and she wished to ex-
plain how they had been advised ; but he said to Bur-
namy:

" I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morn-
ing. Don't let me interrupt you," he added, patron-

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izingly, to Mrs. March. He put his hand up toward
his hat and sauntered away out of the door.

Bumamy did not speak ; and she only asked at last,
to relieve the silence, " Is Mr. StoUer an American ?"

" Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy
laugh. " His people were German emigrants who set-
tled in southern Indiana. That makes him as much
American as any of us, doesn^t it ?"

Bumamy spoke with his mind on his French-Cana-
dian grandfather, who had come down through De-
troit when tlieir name was Bonami; but Mrs. March
answered from her eight generations of New Eng-
land ancestry. "Oh, for the West, yes, perhaps,"
and they neither of them said anything more about
StoUer.

In their room, where she foimd March waiting for
her amid their arriving baggage, she was so full of
her pent-up opinions of Bumamy's patron that she
would scarcely speak of the view from their windows
of the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. " Yes,
yes; very nice, and I know I shall enjoy it ever so
much. But I don't know what you will think of that
poor young Bumamy !*'

" Why, what's happened to him ?"

" Happened ? StoUer' s happened."

" Oh, have you seen him already ? Well ?"

" Well, if you had been going to pick out that type
of man you'd have rejected him, because you'd have
said he was too pat. He's like an actor made up for
a Western millionaire. Do you remember that Amer-
ican in UEtrangere which Bernhardt did in Boston
when she first came ? He looks exactly like that, and
he has the worst manners. He stood talking to me
with his hat on and a toothpick in his mouth, and
he made me feel as if he had bought me, along with

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Bumamy, and had paid too much. If you don't give
him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you ;
that's all. I'm sure Bumamy is in some trouble with
him; he's got some sort of hold upon him; what it
could be in such a short time, I can't imagine ; but if
ever a man seemed to be in a man's power, he does
in hisr

" Now," said March, " your pronouns have got so
far beyond me that I think we'd better let it all go till
after supper; perhaps I shall see StoUer myself by
that time."

She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with
Stoller, but she entered with impartial intensity into
the fact that the elevator at Pupp's had the character-
istic of always coming up and never going down with
passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid
door, and there was no bell to summon it, or any place
to take it except on the ground-floor ; but the stairs by
which she could descend were abundant and stately;
and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of
the largest and ugliest hotels in New York ; how ugly
it was, she said she should never have known if she
had not seen it there.

The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon,
where they supped amid rococo sculptures and fres-
coes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast windows
on a spread of tables without, which were already fill-
ing up for the evening concert. Around them at the
different tables there were groups of faces and figures
fascinating in their strangeness, with that distinction
which abashes our American level in the presence of
European inequality.

" How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil," she
said, "beside all these people! I used to feel it in
Europe when I was young, and now I'm certain that

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we must seem like two faded -in old village photo-
graphs. We don't even look intellectual! I hope we
look goody

" I know I do," said March. The waiter went for
their supper, and they joined in guessing the different
nationalities in the room. A French party was easy
enough ; a Spanish mother and daughter were not dif-
ficult, though whether they were not South- American
remained uncertain; two elderly maiden ladies were
unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and were ob-
viously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf
unturned; some Triestines gave themselves away by
their Venetian accent; but a large group at a farther
table were imassignable in the strange language which
they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter.
They were a family party of old and young, they were
having a good time, with a freedom which she called
baronial; the ladies wore white satin or black lace,
but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute
them, for no reason but their outlandishness, to Tran-
sylvania. March pretended to prefer a table full of
Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois and yet
of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a mid-
dle-aged man of learned aspect, and they both decided
to think of himi as the Herr Professor, but they did
not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him till he
drew a long comb from his waistcoat-pocket and combed
his hair and beard with it above the table.

The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they
all jargoned together at once, and laughed at the jokes
passing among them. One old gentleman had a pe-
culiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his
gums when he threw his head back to laugh, and showed
an upper jaw toothless except for two incisors stand-
ing guard over the chasm between. Suddenlv he choked,

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coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up
before him, and —

*' Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of
irony which he reserved for his wife's preoccupations
with aristocracies of all sorts. " I think I prefer my
Hair Professor, bourgeois as he is/'

The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had
risen from their table, and were making for the door
without having paid for their supper. The head waiter
ran after them ; with a real delicacy for their mistake
he explained that though in most places the meals were
charged in the bill, it was the custom in Carlsbad to
pay for them at the table; one could see that he was
making their error a pleasant adventure to them which
they could laugh over together, and write home about
without a pang.

" And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning
the party of the aristocracy, "prefer the manners of
the lower classes.''

" Oh yes," he admitted. " The only manners we have
at home are black ones. But you mustn't lose courage.
Perhaps the nobility are not always so baronial."

" I don't know whether we have manners at home,"
she said, " and I don't believe I care. At least we have
decencies."

"Don't be a jingo," said her husband.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Bumamy
from duty for the day, he was not so full of resources
in himself, and he had not so general an acquaintance
in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow
make up to him in the reading-room that night. He
laid down a New York paper ten days old in despair
of having left any American news in it, and pushed
several continental Anglo-American papers aside with

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his elbow, as he gave a contemptuous glance at the
foreign journals, in Bohemian, Hungarian, Qerman,
French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

" I wonder,'* he said, " how long it '11 take 'em, over
here, to catch on to our way of having pictures ?"

Bumamy had come to his newspaper work since
illustrated journalism was established, and he had
never had any shock from it at home, but so sensitive
is youth to environment that, after four days in Eu-
rope, the New York paper Stoller had laid down was
already hideous to him. From the politic side of his
nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's prefer-
ence. " I suppose it will be some time yet."

" I wish," said Stoller, with a savage disregard of
expressed sequences and relevancies, " I could ha' got
some pictures to send home with that letter this after-
noon : something to show how they do things here, and
be a kind of object-lesson." This term had come up
in a recent campaign when some employers, by shut-
ting down their works, were showing their employes
what would happen if the employes voted their polit-
ical opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered
its meaning and was fond of using it. " I'd like 'era
to see the woods around here that the city owns, and
the springs, and the donkey-carta, and the theatre, and
everything, and give 'em some practical ideas."

Bumamy made an uneasy movement

" I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our
improvements, and show how a town can be carried on
when it's managed on business principles. Why didn't
you think of it ?"

" Really, I don't know,^' said Bumamy, with a touch
of impatience.

They had not met the evening before on the best
of terms. Stoller had expected Burnamy twenty-four

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hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure with him
for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have
spent at Carlsbad ; and Bumamy had been unsatisfac-
tory in accounting for the delay. But he had taken
hold so promptly and so intelligently that by working
far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he
had got Stoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and
had sent oflF in time for the first steamer the letter
which was to appear over the proprietor's name in his
paper. It was a sort of rough but very full study of
the Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation,
the .municipal ownership of the springs and the lands,
and the public control in everything. It condemned
the aristocratic constitution of the municipality, but it
charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence, and
wisdom of the administration, under which there was
no poverty and no idleness, and which was managed
like any large business.

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure once
or twice, and Bumamy suffered it submissively imtil
now. But now, at the change in Bumamy^s tone, he
changed his manner a little.

" Seen your friends since supper ?" he asked.

" Only a moment. They are rather tired, and they've
gone to bed."

" That the fellow that edits that book you write
forP

" Yes ; he owns it, too.''

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's
respect, and he asked, more deferentially, "Makin' a
good thing out of it ?"

" A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class week-
lies feel the competition of the ten-cent monthlies. But
Every Other Week is about the best thing we've got

in the literary way, and I guess it's holding its own."
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" Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad/' StoUer
said, with a return to the sourness of his earlier mood.
^' I don't know as I care much for his looks; I seen
him when he came in with you. No snap to hinu" He
clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails
with, and started up with the abruptness which marked
all his motions, mental and physical; as he walked
heavily out of the room he said, without looking at
Bumamy, " You want to be ready by half-past ten at
the latest^'

StoUer's father and mother were poor emigrants
who made their way to the West with the instinct
for a sordid prosperity native to their race and class;
and they set up a small butcher shop in the little In-
diana town where their son was bom, and throve in it
from the start He could remember his mother help-
ing his father make the sausage and headcheese and
pickle the pigs' feet which they took turns in selling
at as great a price as they could extort from the towns-
people. She was a good and tender mother, and when
her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in mimicry
after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught
him to fight the Americans, who stoned him when he
came out of his gate and mobbed his home-coming;
and mocked and tormented him at play-time till they
wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him
through the exhaustion of their invention. No one,
so far as the gloomy, stocky, rather dense little boy
could make out, ever interfered in his behalf; and he
grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which
entailed upon him the hard fate of being Dutch among
the Americans. He hated his native speech so much
that he cried when he was forced to use it with his
father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with

the boys who proposed to parley with him in it on such

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terms as " Nix come aroiice in de Dytchman's house.^*
He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took
him out of school, when he was old enough to help in
the shop, he could not get back to it. He regarded his
father's business as part of his national disgrace, and
at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it
and informally apprenticed himself to the village black-
smith and wagon-maker. When it came to his setting-
up for himself in the business he had chosen, he had
no help from his father, who had gone on adding dol-
lar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the
place.

Jacob prospered, too; his old playmates, who had
used him so cruelly, had many of them come to like
him ; but as a Dutchman they never dreamed of asking
him to their houses when they were young people, any
more than when they were children. He was long
deeply in love with an American girl whom he had
never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry
an American. He ended by marrying the daughter of
Pferd the brewer, who had been at an American school
in Indianapolis, and had come home as fragilely and
nasally American as anybody. She made him a good,
sickly, fretful wife; and bore him five children, of
whom two survived, with no visible taint of their Ger-
man origin.

In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left
his money to his son, with the understanding that he
was to provide for his mother, who would gladly have
given every cent to him and been no burden to him,
if she could. He took her home, and cared tenderly
for her as long as she lived; and she meekly did her
best to abolish herself in a household trying so hard
to be American. She could not help her native ac-
cent, but she kept silence when her son's wife had

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company; and when her eldest granddaughter began
very early to have American callers she went out of
the room; they would not have noticed her if she had
stayed.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in pro-
portion to his financial importance in the commimity.
He first commended himself to the Better Element by
crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were
now the largest business interest of the place; and he
rose on a wave of municipal reform to such a height
of favor with the respectable classes that he was elected
on a Citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In the re-
action which followed he was barely defeated for Con-
gress, and was talked of as a dark horse who might be
put up for the governorship some day; but those who
knew him best predicted that he would not get far in
politics, where his bull -headed business ways would
bring him to ruin sooner or later ; they said, " You
can't swing a bolt like you can a strike.'*

When his mother died, he surprised his old neigh-
bors by going to live in Chicago, though he kept his
works in the place where he and they had grown up
together. His wife died shortly after, and within four
years he lost his three eldest children ; his son, it was
said, had begim to go wrong first. But the rumor of
his increasing wealth drifted back from Chicago; he
was heard of in different enterprises and speculations ;
at last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and
then his boyhood friends decided that Jake was going
into politics again.

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the
great city he came to understand better that to be an
American in all respects was not the best. His mount-
ing sense of importance began to be retroactive in the
direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the

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little town near Wiirzbnrg which his people had come
from, and found that he had relatives still living there,
some of whom had become people of substance; and
about the time his health gave way from life-long glut-
tony, and he was ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty
much made up his mind to take his younger daughters
and put them in school for a year or two in Wiirzburg,
for a little discipline if not education. He had now
left them there, to learn the language, which he had
forgotten with such heart-burning and shame, and
music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they part-
ed from their father with open threats of running
away; and in his heart he did not altogether blame
them. He came away from Wiirzburg raging at the
disrespect for his money and his standing in business
which had brought him a more galling humiliation
there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood
at Des Vaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought
Americanism to the point of wishing to commit lese-
majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who had
snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle
to shame in his person; there was something like the
bird of his step-country in Stoller's pale eyes and huge
beak.

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Mabch sat with a company of other patients in the
anteroom of the doctor, and when it came his turn to
he prodded and kneaded he was ashamed at heing told
he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor
wrote out a careful dietary for him, with a prescrip-
tion of a certain number of glasses of water at a cer-
tain spring and a certain number of baths, and a rule
for the walks he was to take before and after eating;
then the doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed
him caressingly out of his inner office. It was too late
to begin his treatment that day, but he went with his
wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his
shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with
the others at once; he came near forgetting the small
napkin of Turkish towelling which they stuffed into
their cups, but happily the shopman called him back
in time to sell it to him.

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way
to the street exchanged with the servants cleaning the
hotel stairs the first of the gloomy Outen Morgens
which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be
so finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably
expressive only of the popular despair of getting
through with them before night; but March heard
the salutation sorrowfully groaned out on every hand
as he joined the straggling current of invalids which
swelled on the way past the silent shops and cafes in
the Alte Wiese till it filled the street and poured its

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thousands upon the promenade before the classic col-
onnade of the Miihlbrunn. On the other bank of the
Tepl the Sprudel flings its steaming waters by irregu-
lar impulses into the air under a pavilion of iron and
glass ; but the Miihlbrunn is the source of most resort.
There is an instnmiental concert somewhere in Carls-
bad from early rising till bedtime; and now at the
Miihlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;
and imder the pillared porch, as well as before it, the
multitude shuffled up and down, draining their cups
by slow sips, and then taking each his place in the in-
terminable line moving on to replenish them at the
spring.

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some
vice of their climate is said peculiarly to fit for the
healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his eye in their
long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats
of plush or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming
down before their ears. They were old and young,
they were grizzled and red and black, but they seemed
all well-to-do ; and what impresses one first and last at
Carlsbad is that its waters are mainly for the healing
of the rich. After the Polish Jews, the Greek priests
of Russian race were the most striking figures. There
were types of Latin ecclesiastics who were striking in
their way, too; and the uniforms of certain Austrian
officers and soldiers brightened the picture. Here and
there a Southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine,
looked passionately out of the mass of dull German
visages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than any
other gentile nation, are to the fore. Their misfits,
their absence of style, imparted the prevalent effect;
though now and then among the women a Hungarian,
or Pole, or Parisian, or American relieved the eye
which seeks beautv and srace rather than the domestic

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virtues. There were certain faces, types of discom-
fort and disease, which appealed from the beginning
to the end. A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a
livid South-American, were of a lasting fascination to
March.

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the
crowd, was the difficulty of assigning people to their
respective nations, and he accused his years of having
dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their
long disuse in his homogeneous American world. The
Americans themselves fused with the European races
who were often so hard to make out; his fellow-citi-
zens would not be identified till their bad voices gave
them away ; he thought the women's voices the worst

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady
mechanical action dipped the cups into the steaming
source and passed them impersonally up to their own-
ers. With the patients at the Miihlbrunn it was often
a half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict
etiquette forbade any attempt to anticipate it. The
water was merely warm and flat, and after the first
repulsion one could forget it. March formed a child-
ish habit of counting ten between the sips, and of fin-
ishing the cup with a gulp which ended it quickly ; he
varied his walks between cups by going sometimes to
a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group
of Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to
the little park beyond the Kurhaus, where some old
women were sweeping up from the close sward the
yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped
overnight. He liked to sit there and look at the city
beyond the Tepl, where it climbed the wooded heights
in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and folds
of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly, ab-
sent-mindedly, and this, with the chill in the air, deep-

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ened a pleasant illusion of Quebec offered by the upper
town across the stream; but there were sunny morn-
ings when the mountains shone softly through a lus-
trous mist, and the air was almost warm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion
of Bumamy*s employer, whom he had sometimes noted
in the line at the Miihlbnmn, waiting his turn, cup in
hand, with a face of sullen impatience. StoUer ex-
plained that though you could have the water brought
to you at your hotel, he chose to go to the spring for
the sake of the air; it was something you had got to
live through; before he had that young Bumamy to
help him he did not know what to do with his time,
but now every minute he was not eating or sleeping
he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk
much. He examined March, with a certain mixture
of respect and contempt, upon the nature of the lit-
erary life, and how it differed from the life of a jour-
nalist. He asked if he thought Bumamy would amount
to anything as a literary man; he so far assented to
March's faith in him as to say. " He's smart." He told
of leaving his daughters in school at Wiirzburg; and
upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his
pathetic loneliness without moving his liking, as he
passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his
spring, and while she gave it to a second, who dipped
it and handed it to a third for its return to him, he
heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-
morning to them all in English. " Are you going to
teach them United States?'* he asked of a face with
which he knew such an appeal would not fail.

"Well," the man admitted, "I try to teach them
that much. They like it. You are an American? I
am glad of it. I have 'most lost the use of my lungs,

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here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till
she's about dead ; then I'm out of it for the rest of the
day ; I can't speak German."

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the
West. He must be that sort of untravelled American
whom March had so seldom met, but he was. afraid to
ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it
should prove the third or fourth. " Are you taking
the cure ?" he asked instead.

" Oh no. My wife is. She'll be along directly ; I
come down here and drink the waters to encourage
her; doctor said to. That gets me in for the diet,
too. I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than
I ever did in my life before. Prunes ? My Lord, I'm
full o' prunes ! Well, it does me good to see an Amer-
ican, to know him. I couldn't 'a' told you, if you
hadn't have spoken."

" Well," said March, " I shouldn't have been so sure
of you, either, by your looks."

" Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these
Dutch. But they know us, and they don't want us,
except just for one thing, and that's our money. I
tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here.
Soon's they got all our money, or think they have,
they say, ' Here, you Americans, this is my country ;
you get ofiF'; and we got to get. Ever been over be-
fore?"

" A great while ago ; so long that I can hardly be-
lieve it."

" It's my first time. My name's Otterson : I'm f r«m
out in Iowa."

March gave him his name, and added that he was
from New York.

" Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn't

an Eastern man you was just with ?"

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" No ; he's from Chicago. He's a Mr. Stoller.'*

" Not the buggy man ?"

" I believe he makes buggies/'

"Well, you do meet everybody here." The lowan
was silent for a moment, as if hushed by the weighty
thought " I wish my wife could have seen him. I
jiist want her to see the man that made our buggy. /
don't know what's keeping her, this morning," he add-
ed, apologetically. "Look at that fellow, will you,
tryin' to get away from those women!" A yoimg of-
ficer was doing his best to take leave of two ladies,
who seemed to be mother and daughter; they detained
him by their united arts, and clung to him with caress-
ing words and looks. He was red in the face with his
polite struggles when he broke from; them at last.
"How they do hang on to a man over here!" the
Iowa man continued. "And the Americans are as
bad as any. Why, there's one ratty little English-
man up at our place, and our girls just swarm after
him; their mothers are worse. Well, it's so, Jenny,"
he said to the lady who had joined them, and whom
March turned round to see when he spoke to her. " If
I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man. And
these officers! Put their miis-taches up at night in
curl-papers, they tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Ot-
terson, Mr. March. Well, had your first glass yet,
Jenny ? I'm just going for my second tumbler."

He took his wife back to the spring, and began to
tell her about Stoller ; she made no sign of caring for
him; and March felt inculpated. She relented a little
toward him as they drank together; when he said he
must be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked
where he breakfasted, and said, " Why, we go to the
Posthof, too." He answered that then they should bo
sure some time to meet there ; he did not venture f ur-

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ther ; he reflected that ISilrs. March had her reluctances,
too; she distrusted people who had amused or interested
him before she met them.

Bumamy had foimd the Posthof for them, as he
had found most of the other agreeable things in Carls-
bad, which he brought to their knowledge one by one,
with such forethought that March said he hoped he
should be cared for in his declining years as an editor
rather than as a father; there was no tenderness like
a young contributor's.

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at
Pupp's just the time and space between their last cup
of water and their first cup of coffee which are pre-
scribed at Carlsbad ; but the Marches were aware some-
how from the beginning that Pupp's had not the hold
upon the world at breakfast which it had at the mid-
day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the con-
cert was there. Still, it was amusing, and they were
patient of Burnamy's delay till he could get a morning
off from Stoller and go with them to the Posthof. He
met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March
was to join them on his way from the springs with
his bag of bread. The earlier usage of buying the
delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which form
the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain
shop in the town, and carrying them to the caf6 with
you, is no longer of such binding force as the custom
of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery. You choose
it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded
by half -past seven, and when you have collected the
prescribed loaves into the basket of metallic filigree
given you by one of the baker's maids, she puts it into
a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the
other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their
paper bags making a festive rustling as they go.

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Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely
meadow-lands, a good mile up the brawling Tepl, be-
fore they join on the right side of the torrent, where
the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs
let the Sim and rain impartially through upon its army
of little tables. By this time the slow onmibus ply-
ing between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley
beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and
keeps on past half a dozen other cafes, where patients
whose prescriptions marshal them beyond the Posthof
drop off by the dozens and scores.

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and
overhung at points with wooded steeps, when it leaves
the town; but on the right it is bordered with shops
and restaurants a great part of its length. In leafy
nooks between these, uphill walks begin their climb of
the mountains, from the foot of votive shrines set round
with tablets commemorating in German, French, Rus-
sian, Hebrew, Magyar, and Czech, the cure of high-
wellboms of all those races and languages. Booths
glittering with the lapidary's work in the cheaper gems,
or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers, al-
ternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the
Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhang-
ing cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Vien-
nese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like,
and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rab-
bits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks
that strut about the feet of the passers and expand their
iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Bumamy got his charges with difficulty by the
shrines in which they felt the far-reflected charm of
the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian highways of their
early travel, and by the toy -shops where they had a
mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the

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children, ending in a pang for the fact that they were
children no longer. He waited politely while Mrs.
March made up her mind that she would not buy any
laces of the motherly old women who showed them un-
der pent-roofs on way-side tables; and he waited pa-
tiently at the gate of the flower-gardens beyond the
shops where March bought lavishly of sweet-peas from
the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful
joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him
a chance of speaking his German.

"You'll find," he said, as they crossed the road
again, "that it's well to trifle a good deal; it makes
the time pass. I should still be lagging along in my
thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am
well on in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than
ever."

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds
of the cafe at last, and a turn of the path brought
them to the prospect of its tables, under the trees, be-
tween the two long glazed galleries where the break-
f asters take refuge at other tables when it rains; it
rains nearly always, and the trunks of the trees are as
green with damp as if painted ; but that morning the
sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a
group of pretty serving-maids, each with her name on
a silver band pinned upon her breast, met them and
bade them a Guten Morgen of almost cheerful note,
but gave way to an eager little smiling blonde, who
came pushing down the path at sight of Bumamy, and
claimed him for her own.

" Ah, Lili ! We want an extra good table this morn-
ing. These are some American Excellencies, and you
must do your best for them."

" Oh yes," the girl answered in English, after a radi-
ant salutation of the Marches ; " I get you one. You

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are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one
already."

She ran among the tables along the edge of the
, western edge of the gallery, and was far beyond hear-
ing his protest that he was not earlier than usual when
she beckoned him to the table she had found. She
had crowded it in between two belonging to other girls,
and by the time her breakf asters came up she was ready
for their order, with the pouting pretence that the girls
always tried to rob her of the best places. Bumamy
explained proudly, when she went, that none of the
other girls ever got an advantage of her ; she had more
-custom than any three of them, and she had hired a
man to help her carry her orders. The girls were all
from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived
at home in the winter on their summer tips; their
wages were nothing, or less, for sometimes they paid
for their places.

" What a mass of information !*' said March. " How
did you come by it V^

" Newspaper habit of interviewing the imiverse."

" It's not a bad habit, if one doesn't carry it too far.
How did Lili learn her English ?"

" She takes lessons in the winter. She's a perfect
little electric motor. I don't believe any Yankee girl
could equal her."

" She would expect to marry a millionaire if she
did. What astonishes one over here is to see how
contentedly people prosper along on their own level.
And the women do twice the work of the men with-
out expecting to equal them in any other way. At
Pupp's, if we go to one end of the out -door restau-
rant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring
our coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat,
and another to make out our bill, and I have to tip all

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three of them. If we go to the other end, one girl
serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make
it less than the least I give any three of the men
waiters.''

" You ought to be ashamed of that,'' said his wife.

" I'm not. I'm simply proud of your sex, my
dear."

" Women do nearly everything, here," said Buma-
my, impartially. " They built that big new Kaiserbad
building: mixed the mortar, carried the hods, and laid
the stone."

'** That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But
come, Mr. Bumamy ! Isn't there anybody of polite in-
terest that you know of in this crowd ?"

" Well, I can't say," Bumamy hesitated

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove
and the galleries; the tables were already filled, and
men were bringing other tables on their heads and
making places for them, with entreaties for pardon
everywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directing
them; the pretty serving - girls were running to and
from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill, sweet
promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken
through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the
ladies, and dappled the figures of the men with harle-
quin patches of light and shade. A tall woman, with
a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial perma-
nency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trail-
ing herself up the sun-shot path, and foimd, with hardy
insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-
looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for
her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the
black poodle out of " Faust" Bumamy had heard her
history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on
it, which he called Europa, not after the old fable, but

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because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on
one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place
in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She
was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts
which corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the
vested interests. In her history there had been officers
and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was
this sullen young fellow. . . . Bumamy had wondered
if it would do to ofiFer his poem to March, but the pres-
ence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he
had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its apt-
ness.

" I don^t believe," he said, " that I recognize any
celebrities here."

" I'm sorry," said March. " Mrs. March would have
been glad of some Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or
a few Excellenzes, or even some mere wellboms. But
we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."

" Pm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his
wife. " Don't worry about me, Mr. Bumamy. Why
can't we have this sort of thing at home ?"

" We're getting something like it in the roof - gar-
dens," said March. "We couldn't have it naturally
because the climate is against it, with us. At this
time in the morning over there the sun would be burn-
ing the life out of the air, and the flies would be swarm-
ing on every table. At 9 p.m. the mosquitoes would
be eating us up in such a grove as this. So we have to
use artifice, and lift our Posthop above the fly-line and
the mosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a
fly since I came to Europe. I really miss them; it
makes me homesick."

" There are plenty in Italy," his wife suggested.

" We must get down there before we go home. But
why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in
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Germany? Why did no traveller ever put it in his
book ? When your stewardess said so on the steamer, I
remember that you regarded it as a blufiF." He turned
to Bumamy, who was listening with the deference of
a contributor : " Isn't Lili rather long ! I mean for
such a very prompt person. Oh no !''

But Bumamy got to his feet, and shouted " Frau-
lein!'* to Lili; with her hireling at her heels she was
flying down a distant aisle between the tables. She
called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder,
" In a minute !" and vanished in the crowd.

" Does that mean anything in particular ? There's
really no hurry."

" Oh, I think she'll come now,'' said Bumamy.
March protested that he had only been amused at
Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his im-
patience; she begged Bumamy's pardon, and repeated
civilities passed between them. She asked if he did
not think some of the young ladies were pretty beyond
the European average ; a very few had style ; the moth-
ers were mostly fat, and not stylish ; it was well not to
regard the fathers too closely; several old gentlemen
were clearing their throats behind their newspapers,
with noises that made her quail. There was no one
so effective as the Austrian officers, who put them-
selves a good deal on show, bowing from their hips to
favored groups; with the sun glinting from their eye-
glasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they
moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced
women.

" They all wear corsets," Bumamy explained.

" How much you know already !" said Mrs. March.
" I can see that Europe won't be lost on you in any-
thing. Oh, who's thatV^ A lady whose costume ex-
pressed Paris at every point glided up the middle aisle

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of the grove with a graceful tilt. Bumamy was si-
lent " She must be an American. Do you know who
she is?"

" Yes." He hesitated a little to name a woman whose
tragedy had once filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination
which such tragedies inspire. "What grace! Is she
beautiful ?"

" Very." Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge,
but somehow Mrs. March did not like his knowing who
she was, and how beautiful. She asked March to ^look,
but he refused.

" Those things are too squalid," he said, and she
liked him for saying it ; she hoped it would not be lost
upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them
and flung the burden off her tray on the stone floor be-
fore her; some of the dishes broke, and the breakfast
was lost. Tears same into the girl's eyes and rolled
down her hot cheeks. " There f That is what I call
tragedy," said March. " She'll have to pay for those
things."

" Oh, give her the monev, dearest!"

"How can I?"

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili
and her hireling behind her came bearing down upon
them with their three substantial breakfasts on two
well-laden trays. She forestalled Bumamy's reproaches
for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down
the dishes of ham and tongue and egg, and the little
pots of coffee and frothed milk.

" I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to
serve an American princess."

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of
those noble international marriages which fill our wom«

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en with vainglory for such of their compatriots as make
them.

" Oh, come now, Lili !" said Burnamy. " We have
queens in America, but nothing so low as princesses.
This was a queen, wasn't it ?"

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed
her. " All people say it is princess,'^ she insisted.

" Well, if she's a princess we must look her up
after breakfast/' said Burnamy. "Where is she
sitting?"

She pointed at a comer so far off on the other side
that no one could be distinguished, and then was gone,
with a smile flashed over her shoulder, and her hire-
ling trying to keep up with her.

" We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man,"
said Burnamy. " We think it reflects credit on her
customers."

March had begun his breakfast with the voracious
appetite of an early-rising invalid. " What coffee !"
He drew a long sigh after the first draught.

" It's said to be made of burnt figs," said Burnamy,
from the inexhaustible advantage of his few days' pri-
ority in Carlsbad.

" Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as
soon as possible. But why burnt figs? That seems
one of those doubts which are much more difficult than
faith."

" It's not only burnt figs," said Burnamy, with
amiable superiority, " if it is burnt figs, but it's made
after a formula invented by a consensus of physicians,
and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carls-
bad makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same
price."

*^ You are leaving us very little to find out for our-
selves," sighed March.

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" Oh, I know a lot more things. Are you fond, of

fishing r

" Not veiy."

" You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl,
but they send an official with you who keeps count,
and when you have had your sport, the trout belong
to the municipality just as they did before you caught
them."

" I don't see why that isn't a good notion : the last
thing I should want to do would be to eat a fish that
I had caught, and that I was persoiially acquainted
with. Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad, I
don't wonder people get their doctors to tell them to
come back."

Bumamy told them a number of facts he said Stol-
ler had got together about the place, and had given
him to put in shape. It was run in the interest of
people who had got out of order, so that they would
keep coming to get themselves in order again; you
could hardly buy an unwholesome meal in the town;
all the cooking was Jcurgemdss. He won such favor
with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said
to March, " But if you ever should have a fancy for a
fish of your personal acquaintance, there's a restaurant
up the Tepl, where they let you pick out your trout in
the water ; then they catch him and broil him for you,
and you know what you are eating."

" Is it a municipal restaurant ?"

" Semi-municipal," said Bumamy, laughing.

"We'll take Mrs. March," said her husband, and
in her gravity Bumamy felt the limitations of a wom-
an's sense of humor, which always define themselves
for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good
graces by telling her what he knew about distinctions

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and dignities that he now saw among the breakfasters.
The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were
set together in such labyrinths that any one who left
the central aisle was lost in them. The serving - girls
ran more swiftly to and fro, responding with a more
nervous shrillness to the calls of " Fraulein ! Frau-
lein !" that followed them. The proprietor, in his bare
head, stood like one paralyzed by his prosperity, which
sent up all round him the clash of knives and crockery,
and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an
hour before Bumamy caught Lilies eye, and three times
she promised to come and be paid before she came.
Then she said, " It is so nice, when you stay a little,"
and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had
broken the dishes in her fall near them she almost wept
with tenderness; she almost winked with wickedness
when he asked if the American princess was still in
her place.

" Do go and see who it can be !" Mrs. March en-
treated. " We'll wait here," and he obeyed. " I am
not sure that I like him," she said, as soon as he was
out of hearing. " I don't know but he's coarse, after
all. Do you approve of his knowing so many people's
taches already ?"

•'^ Would it be any better later ?" he asked in turn.
" He seemed to find you interested."

" It's very different with us ; we're not young," she
urged, only half seriously.

Her husband laughed. " I see you want me to de-
fend him. Oh, hello!" he cried, and she saw Buma-
my coming toward them with a young lady, who was
nodding to them from as far as she could see them.
" This is the easy kind of thing that makes you blush
for the author if you find it in a novel."

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to

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kiss her. " Do you know I felt it must be you all the
time! When did you come? Where is your father?
What hotel are you staying at ?"

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands
with March, that it was last night, and her father was
finishing his breakfast, and it was one of the hotels on
the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared
that he wished to consult March's doctor ; not that there
was anything the matter.

The general himself was not much softened by the
reunion with his fellow - Americans ; he confided to
them that his coffee was poisonous; but he seemed,
standing up with the Paris-N'ew York Chronicle folded
in his hand, to have drunk it all. Was March going
off on his forenoon tramp? He believed that was
part of the treatment, which was probably all hum-
bug, though he thought of trying it, now he was there.
He was told the walks were fine; he looked at Bur-
namy as if he had been praising them, and Bumamy
said he had been wondering if March would not like
to try a mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not
so sincerely, that he thought Mrs. !March would like it.

" I shall like your account of it," she answered.
" But I'll walk back on a level, if you please."

" Oh yes," Miss Triscoe pleaded, " come with us !"
She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with
her father so gracefully that Mrs. March herself could
scarcely have told just where the girl's real purpose of
going with Bumamy began to be evident, or just how
she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the
pleasure of seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.

March went with the young people across the meadow

behind the Posthof and up into the forest, which began

at the base of the mountain. At first they tried to keep

him in the range of their talk ; but he fell behind more

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and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was
less and less possible to include him in it. When it
began to concern their common appreciation of the
Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.

" They're so young in their thoughts," said Buma-
my, " and they seem as much interested in everything
as they could have been thirty years ago. They be-
long to a time when the world was a good deal fresher
than it is now; don't you think? I mean, in the
eighteen-sixties."

" Oh yes, I can see that."

" I don't know why we shouldn't be bom older in
each generation than people were in the last. Perhaps
we are," he suggested.

" I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keep-
ing vigorously up with him ; she let him take the jacket
she threw off, but she would not have his hand at the
little steeps where he wanted to give it.

" I don't believe I can quite make it out myself.
But fancy a man that began to act at twenty, quite
unconsciously of course, from the past experience of
the whole race — "

"He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't
he?"

" Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh.
" But that's where the psychological interest would
come in."

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she
turned from it. "I suppose you've been writing all
sorts of things since you came here."

" Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seem-
ed, and I've had Mr. Stoller's psychological interests
to look after."

" Oh yes 1 Do you like him ?"

"I don't know. He's a lump of honest selfishness.

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He isn't bad. You know where to have him. He's
simple, too.**

" You mean like Mr. March?"

" I don't mean that ; but why not ? They're not of
the same generation, but Stoller isn't modern."

" I'm very curious to see him," said the girL

" Do you want me to introduce him ?"

" You can introduce him to papa."

They stopped and looked across the curve of the
moimting path down on March, who had sunk on a way-
side seat and was mopping his forehead. He saw them,
and called up: "Don't wait for me! I'll join you
gradually !"

" I don't want to lose you !" Bumamy called back,
but he kept on with Miss Triscoe. "I want to get
the Hirschensprung in," he explained. " It's the cliff
where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet
to get away from an emperor who was after him."

" Oh yes. They have them everywhere."

" Do they ? Well, anyway, there's a noble view up
there."

There was no view on the way up. The Germans'
notion of a woodland is everywhere that of a dense
forest such as their barbarous tribes primevally herded
in. It means the close - set stems of trees, with their
tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so dense-
ly that you may walk dry through it almost as long as
a German shower lasts. When the sun shines there is
a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and
there with the gold that trickles through. There ia
nothing of the accident of an American wood in these
forests, which have been watched and weeded by man
ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries,
but they have the charm which no human care can
alienate. The smell of their bark and their leaves, and

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of the moist, flowerless earth about their roots, came
to March where he sat rich with the memories of his
comitry-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of
his long life in cities since, and made him a part of
nature, with dulled interests and dimmed perspectives,
so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of ex-
emption from care. There was no wild life to pene-
trate his isolation ; no birds, not a squirrel, not an in-
sect; an old man who had bidden him good-morning, as
he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe,
and was less intrusive than if he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of these
young people playing the inevitable comedy of hide-
and-seek which the youth of the race has played from
the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted
the forest, and passed up and down before him in ful-
filment of their several prescriptions, had a thin un-
reality in spite of the physical bulk that prevailed
among them, and they heightened the relief that the
forest -spirit brought him from the strenuous contact
of that young drama. He had been almost painfully
aware that the persons in it had met, however little
they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their
brief separation, and he fancied it was the girl who
had unconsciously operated their reimion in response
to the young man's longing, her will making itself
electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless
telegraphy which love has long employed and science
has just begun th imagine.

He would have been willing that they should get

home alone, but he knew that his wife would require

an account of them from him, and though he could

have invented something of the kind, if it came to the

worst, he was aware that it would not do for him to

arrive without them. The thought goaded him from

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his seat, and he joined the upward procession of his
fellow -sick, as it met another procession straggling
downward; the ways branched in all directions, with
people on them everywhere, bent upon building up in
a month the health which they would spend the rest
of the year in demolishing.

He came upon his charges imexpectedly at a turn
of the path, and Miss Triscoe told him that he ought
to have been with them for the view from the Hir-
schensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she
made Bumamy corroborate her praise of it, and agree
with her that it was worth the climb a thousand times ;
he modestly accepted the credit she appeared willing
to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.

Between his work for StoUer and what sometimes
seemed the obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Bur-
namy was not very much with Miss Triscoe. He was
not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty
English church on the hill, where he contributed be-
yond his means to the support of the English clergy
on the Continent, for the sake of looking at her back
hair during the service, and losing himself in the grace-
ful lines which defined the girl's figure from the slant
of her flowery hat to the point where the pew -top
crossed her elastic waist. One happy morning the
general did not come to church, and he had the fort-
une to walk home with her to her pension, where she
lingered with him a moment, and almost made him be-
lieve she might be going to ask him to come in.

The next evening, when he was sauntering down
the row of glittering shops beside the Tepl, with Mrs.
March, they overtook the general and his daughter at
a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors
in the window; she said she wished she were still lit-
tle, so that she could get them. They walked home with

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the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs. March back to
the shop. The man had already put up his shutters,
and was just closing his door, but Bumamy pushed in
and asked to look at the stork-scissors they had seen in
the window. The gas was out, and the shopman light-
ed a very dim candle to show them.

" I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what
she said, Mrs. March," he laughed, nervously, "and
you must let me lend you the money.''

"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humor-
ing his feint. " Shall I put my card in for the man to
send home to her with them ?"

"Well — ^no. Xo. Xot your card — exactly. Or,
yes ! Yes, you must, I suppose."

They made the hushing street gay with their laugh-
ter; the next evening Miss Triscoe came upon the
Marches and Bumamy where they sat after supper
listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs.
March for the scissors. Then she and Bumamy had
their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe joined them, to
her father's frowning mystification. He stared round
for a table; they were all taken, and he could not re-
fuse the interest Bumamy made with the waiters to
bring them one and crowd it in. He had to ask him
to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard
the concert through beside Miss Triscoe.

" What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of
stork-scissors ?" March demanded, when his wife and he
were alone.

" Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she be-
gan, in a tone which he felt to be wheedling, and she
told the story of the scissors.

"Look here, my dear! Didn't you promise to let
this love-affair alone ?"

" That was on the ship. And besides, what would

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you have done, I should like to know? Would you
have refused to let him buy them for her?'' She
added, carelessly, " He wants us to go to the Kurhaus
ball with him.''

"Oh, Joes he!"

" Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father
to let her go if we will chaperon them. And I promised
that you would."

"That /would?"

" It will do just as well if you go. And it will bo
very amusing; you can see something of Carlsbad so-
ciety."

" But I'm not going !" he declared. " It would in-
terfere with my cure. The sitting up late would be
bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I should
eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do
all sorts of imwholesome things."

" Nonsense ! The refreshments will be Teurgemdss,
of course."

" You can go yourself," he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty
as it is before twenty, but still it has claims upon the
imagination, and the novel circumstance of a ball in
the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs.
March. It was the annual reunion which is given by
municipal authority in the large hall above the bath-
rooms; it is frequented with safety and pleasure by
curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began
to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she be-
lieved that she could finally have made March go in
her place, but she felt that she ought really to go in
his and save him from the late hours and the late
supper.

'* Very well, then," she said at last, " I will go."

It appeared that any civil person might go to the re-

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union who chose to pay tvvo florins and a half. There
must have heen some sort of restriction, and the ladies
of Bumamy's party went with a good deal of amused
curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they
saw none unless it was the advantages which the mili-
tary had. The long hall over the bath-rooms shaped
itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and all
the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half-past
eight were crowded with people eating, drinking, and
smoking. The military enjoyed the monopoly of a
table next the rail dividing the dancing from the
dining space. There the tight-laced Ilerr Hauptmanns
and Herr Lieutenants sat at their sausage and beer and
cigars in the intervals of the waltzes, and strengthened
themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and
Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the
dancing-space. From the gallery above many civilian
spectators looked down upon the gayety, and the dress-
coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fash-
ion found their way to the dancing-floor, and toward
ten o'clock it became rather crowded. A party of
American girls showed their Paris dresses in the trans-
atlantic versions of the waltz. At first they danced
with the young men who came with them; but after
awhile they yielded to the custom of the place, and
danced with any of the officers who asked them.

" I know it's the custom," said Mrs. March to Miss
Triscoe, who was at her side in one of the waltzes she
had decided to sit out, so as not to be dancing all the
time with Bumamy, " but I never can like it without
an introduction.'*

" No," said the girl, with the air of putting temp-
tation decidedly away, *^ I don't believe papa would,
either."

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A young officer came up, and drooped in mute sup-
plication before her. She glanced at Mrs. March, who
turned her face away; and she excused herself with
the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by
good fortune, Bumamy, who had been unscrupulously
waltzing with a lady he did not know, came up at the
moment. She rose and put her hand on his arm, and
they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away.
The officer looked after them with amiable admiration ;
then he turned to Mrs. March with a light of banter in
his friendly eyes, and was immistakably asking her to
dance. She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so
much that she forgot her objection to partners with-
out introductions; she forgot her fifty-odd years; she
forgot that she was a mother of grown children and
even a mother-in-law ; she remembered only the step of
her out-dated waltz. It seemed to be modem enough
for the cheerful young officer, and they were suddenly
revolving with the rest. A tide of long-forgotten girl-
hood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she
floated off on it past the astonished eyes of Miss Tris-
coe and Bumamy. She saw them falter, as if they had
lost their step in their astonishment ; then they seemed
both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and
was helping Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Bumamy
was brushing the dust from his knees, and the citizen
who had bowled them over was boisterously apologizing
and incessantly bowing.

" Oh, are you hurt ?" Mrs. March implored. " I'm
sure you must be killed ; and I did it 1 I don't know
what I was thinking of 1"

The girl laughed. '' I'm not hurt a bit!"

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and
from the sympathy and congratulation. In the dress-
ing-room she declared again that she was all right.

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"How beautiful you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said,
and she laughed again, and would not agree with her
that she had been ridiculous. " But I'm glad those
American girls didn't see me. And I can't be too
thankful papa didn't come 1"

Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what
General Triscoe would think of her. " You must tell
him I did it I can never lift up my head 1"

" No, I shall not No one did it," said the girl,
magnanimously. She looked down sidelong at her
draperies. " I was so afraid I had torn my dress I
I certainly heard something rip."

It was one of the skirts of Bumamy's coat, which
he had caught into his hand and held in place till he
could escape to the men's dressing-room, where he
had it pinned up so skilfully that the damage was not
suspected by the ladies. He had banged his knee
abominably, too; but they did not suspect that either,
as he limped home on the air beside them, first to
Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's
hotel.

It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as
late as three in the morning anywhere else, when she
let herself into her room. She decided not to tell her
husband then; and even at breakfast, which they had
at the Posthof, she had not got to her confession,
though she had told him everything else about the
ball, when the young officer with whom she had danced
passed between the tables near her. He caught her eye
and bowed with a smile of so much meaning that March
asked, " Who's your pretty young friend ?"

"Oh, thatP^ she answered, carelessly. "That was
one of the officers at the ball," and she laughed.

" You seem to be in the joke, too," he said. " What

is it?"

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" Oh, something. I'll tell you some time. Or per-
haps youUl find out."

" I'm afraid you wonH let me wait."

"No, I won't," and now she told him. She had
expected teasing, ridicule, sarcasm, anything but the
psychological interest mixed with a sort of retrospec-
tive tenderness which he showed. " I wish I could
have seen you; I always thought you danced well."
He added: "It seems that you need a chaperon,
too."

The next morning, after March and General Triscoe
had started off upon one of the hill climbs, the young
people made her go with them for a walk up the Tepl,
as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the
grounds an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the
likeness of people who supposed themselves to have
profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit for hers.
It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's
sitting in turn, and then Bumamy. Then he had the
inspiration to propose that they should all three sit to-
gether, and it appeared that such a group was within
the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in
his little bower, and while he was mounting the pict-
ure they took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening
to American tunes played by his Edison phonograph.

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her
moral fibre; but she tried to draw the line at letting
Burnamy keep the group. " Why not ?" he pleaded.

" You oughtn't to ask," she returned. " You've no
business to have Miss Triscoe's picture, if you must
know."

" But you're there to chaperon us !" he persisted.

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she
said, " You need a chaperon who doesn't lose her head
in a silhouette." But it seemed useless to hold out after

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that, and she heard herself asking, " Shall we let him
keep it, Miss Triscoe ?"

Bumamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying
the silhouette with him, and she kept on with Miss
Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from the gate after
she parted with the girl she found herself confronted
with Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed
at each other in an astonishment from which they had
to recover before they could begin to talk, but from
the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Add-
ing had something to say. The more freely to say it
she asked Mrs. March into her hotel, which was in the
same street with the pension of the Triscoes, and she
let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad;
he promised to be back in an hour.

" Well, now what scrape are you in ?" March asked
when his wife came home, and began to put off her
things, with sighs of excitement which he could not
fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp,
and he seemed very comfortable.

His question suggested something of anterior im-
port, and she told him about the silhouettes, and the
advantage the young people had taken of their power
over her through their knowledge of her foolish be-
havior at the ball.

He said, lazily: " They seem to be working you for
all you're worth. Is that it ?"

" No ; there is something worse. Something's hap-
pened which throws all that quite in the shada Mrs.
Adding is here."

"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for
names which she would not allow was growing on him.

" Don't be stupid, dear ! Mrs. Adding, who sat op-
posite Mr. Kenby on the Norumhia. The mother of

the nice boy."

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" Oil yes I Well, that's good V'

"No, it isn't! Don't say such a thing — till you
know!" she cried, with a certain shrillness which
warned him of an nnfathomed seriousness in the fact.
He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. "I
have been at her hotel, and she has been telling me
that she's just come from Berlin, and that Mr. Ken-
by's been there, and — Now I won't have you mak-
ing a joke of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were
not a thing to be looked for; though, of course, with
the others on our hands you're not to blame for not
thinking of it. But you can see yourself that she's
young and good-looking. She did speak beautifully of
her son, and if it were not for him I don't believe she
would hesitate — "

" For Heaven's sake, what are you driving at ?"
March broke in, and she answered him as vehemently:

" He's asked her to marry him 1"

"Kenby? Mrs. Adding?"

"Yes!"

" Well, now, Isabel, this won't do ! They ought to
be ashamed of themselves. With that morbid, sensi-
tive boy! It's shocking — "

"Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?"
He arrested himself at her threat, and she resumed,
after giving her contempt of his turbulence time to
sink in, " She refused him, of course — "

"Oh, all right, then!"

" You take it in such a way that I've a great mind
not to tell you anything more about it."

" I know you have," he said, stretching himself out
again; "but you'll do it, all the same. You'd have
been awfully disappointed if I had been calm and col-
lected."

" She refused him," she began again, " although she

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respects him, because she feels that she ought to de-
vote herself to her son. Of course she's very young
still; she was married when she was only nineteen to
a man twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I
don't think she ever cared much for her husband ; and
she wants you to find out something about him."

" I never heard of him. I — "

Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have re-
called the most consequent of men from the most logi-
cal and coherent interpretation to the true intent of her
words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolute-
ly : " Well, I won't do it. If she's refused him, that's
the end of it; she needn't know anything about him,
and she has no right to."

"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with
an inductive air. " Of course she has to know about
him nowJ^ She stopped, and March turned his head
and looked expectantly at her. "He said he would
not consider her answer final, but would hope to see
her again, and — She's afraid he may follow her —
What are you looking at me so for ?"

" Is he coming here ?"

" Am I to blame if he is ? He said he was going to
write to her."

March burst into a laugh. " Well, they haven't been
beating about the bush ! When I think how Miss Tris-
coe has been pursuing Bumaray from the first moment
she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was
running from him, and he imagines that he has been
boldly following her, without the least hope from her,
I can't help admiring the simple directness of these
elders."

" And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will

you say ?" she cut in, eagerly.

" I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in

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Carlsbad for ? I came for the cure, and I'm spending
time and money on it. I might as well go and take
my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to
listen to Kenby."

" I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never
seen those people," said Mrs. March. "I donH be-
lieve he'll want to talk with you ; but if — ^"

" Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel ? I'm not going to
have them round in my bread-trough I"

" She isn't. She's at one of the hotels on the hill."

" Very well, let her stay there, then. They can man-
age their love-affairs in their own way. The only one
I care the least for is the boy.'*

" Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Ken-
by, and — No, it's horrid, and you can't make it any-
thing else !"

" Well, I'm not trying to." He turned his face
away. " I must get my nap now." After she thought
he must have fallen asleep, he said, " The first thing
you know those old Eltwins will be coming round and
telling us that they're going to get divorced." Then
he really slept

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VIII

The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see
the Carlsbad world, and the Marches had the habit of
sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort
of literary quality, as if they had come out of some
pleasant German story, but they never knew anything
about them. The father by his dress must have been
a Protestant clergyman ; the mother had been a beauty
and was still very handsome; the daughter was good-
looking, and of good breeding which was both girlish
and ladylike. They commended themselves by always
taking the table d'hote dinner, as the Marches did, and
eating through from the soup and the rank fresh-water
fish to the sweet upon the same principle : the husband
ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert,
which was not good for him. A yoimg girl of a dif-
ferent fascination remained as much a mystery. She
was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became
more bewildering as she advanced through her meal,
especially at supper, which she made of a long cucum-
ber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle's
length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she
held a shivering little hound ; she was in the decorous
keeping of an elderly maid, and had every effect of
being a gracious Fraulein. A curious contrast to her
Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin
swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his
small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon

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the pages of an Italian newspaper. At another table
there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing
draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of
South- Americans, and loudly harangued them in South-
American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which
nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background
lurked a mysterious black face and figure, ironically
subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and the pretty
young girl in the middle distance of the family group.

Amid the shows of a hardened worldliness there
were touching glimpses of domesticity and heart: a
young bride fed her husband soup from her own plate
with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother
and her two pretty daughters hung about a handsome
officer, who must have been newly betrothed to one of
the girls ; and the whole family showed a helpless fond-
ness for him, which he did not despise, though he held
it in check ; the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have
for their whole change of costume a difference from
time to time in the color of their sleeves. The Marches
believed they had seen the growth of the romance which
had eventuated so happily; and they saw other ro-
mances which did not in any wise eventuate. Carls-
bad was evidently one of the great marriage marts of
middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters
to be admired, and everywhere the flower of life was
blooming for the hand of love. It blew by on all the
promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could
be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's
that it flourished. For the most part it seemed to
flourish in vain, and to be destined to be put by for
another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming sum-
mer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian
homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the

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spectators knew; but for their own pleasure they would
not have had their pang for it less; and March objected
to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.
" We could have managed," he said, at the close of their
dinner, as he looked compassionately round upon the
parterre of young girls, " we could have managed with
Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding
and Kenby launched upon us is too much. Of course
I like Kenby, and if the widow alone were concerned
I would give him by blessing: a wife more or a widow
less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the
universe; but — " He stopped, and then he went on:
" Men and women are well enough. They comple-
ment each other very agreeably, and they have very
good times together. But why should they get in love ?
It is sure to make them uncomfortable to themselves
and annoying to others." He broke off, and stared
about him. " My dear, this is really charming — al-
most as charming as the Posthof." The crowd spread
from the open vestibule of the hotel and the shelter of
its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in
the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an
ultimate depth where the musicians were giving the
afternoon concert. Between its two stationary divisions
moved a current of promenaders, with some such ef-
fect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have
liquefied and flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink
and yellow, and white and orange, and all the middle
tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were the
agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of
Carlsbad; and far beyond on the other were the up-
land slopes, with villas and long curves of country
roads, belted in with miles of wall. " It would be
about as offensive to have a love-interest that one per-
sonally knew about intruded here," he said, " as to

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have a two-spanner carriage driven through this crowd.
It ought to be forbidden by the municipality."

Mrs. March listened with her ears but not with her
eyes, and she answered : " See that handsome young
Greek priest! Isn't he an archimandrite? The por-
tier said he was."

" Then let him pass for an archimandrite. Now,"
he recurred to his grievance again, dreamily, " I have
got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and poison his mind
against Bumamy, and ! shall have to instil a few drops
of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of
poor little Rose Adding. Oh," he broke out, "they
will spoil everything! They'll be with us morning,
noon, and night," and he went on to work the joke of
repining at his lot. The worst thing, he said, would be
the lovers' pretence of being interested in something be-
sides themselves, which they were no more capable of
than so many limatics. How could they care for pretty
girls playing tennis on an upland level in the waning
afternoon? Or a cartful of peasant women stopping
to cross themselves at a way-side shrine? Or a whist-
ling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some
way -side raspberries to touch his hat and say good-
morning? Or those preposterous maidens sprinkling
linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies
were full of rain ? Or that blacksmith shop where
Peter the Great made a horseshoe ? Or the monument
of the young warrior-poet Koemer, with a gentle-look-
ing girl and her mother reading and knitting on a
bench before it ? These simple pleasures sufficed ihem,
but what could lovers really care for them ? A peasant
girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast asleep,
while her yoke -fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his
harness near her with one drowsy eye half open for
her and the other for the contents of their cart ; a boy

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chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond
the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the nei^*
bors; the negro door-keeper at the Golden Shield who
ought to have spoken our Southern English, but who
spoke bad German and was from Cairo ; the sweet after-
noon stillness in the woods ; the good German mothers
crocheting at the Posthof concerts : Bumamy as a young
poet might have felt the precious quality of these things,
if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe ; and
she might have felt it if only he had done so. But as
it was it would be lost upon their preoccupation ; with
Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs. March had met Mrs. Add-
ing, she went with her husband to revere a certain
magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered at the
entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schloss-
berg, where he performed the fimction of a kind of
caryatid, and looked, in the black of his skin and the
white of his flowing costume, like a colossal figure
carved in ebony and ivory. The took a roundabout
way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every
house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not a
hotel ; but Ihese were of a sort of sentimental prettiness,
with each a little garden before it, and a bower with
an iron table in it for breakfasting and supping out-
doors; and he said that they would be the very places
for bridal couples who wished to spend the honeymoon
in getting well of the wedding surfeit. She denounced
him for saying such a thing as that, and for his in-
consistency in complaining of lovers while he was will-
ing to think of young married people. He contended
that there was a great difference in the sort of demand
that young married people made upon the interest of
witnesses, and that they were at least on their way to
sanity; and before thev agreed, they had come to the

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hotel with the blackamoor at the door. While they
lingered, sharing the splendid creature's hospitable
pleasure in the spectacle he formed, they were aware
of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman at
the steps of the hotel ; the liveries were very quiet and
distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was
waiting for the Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of
Montenegro, or Prince Henry of Prussia; there were
differing opinions among the twenty or thirty bystand-
ers. Mrs. March said she did not care which it was;
and she was patient of the denouement, which began to
postpone itself with delicate delays. After repeated
agitations at the door among portiers, proprietors, and
waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill to
the spectators, while the coachman and footman re-
mained sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the
carriage moved aside and let an energetic American
lady and her family drive up to the steps. The hotel
people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred
the effect by rushing out and sitting on a balcony to
wait for the delaying royalties. There began to be
more promises of their early appearance; a footman
got down and placed himself at the carriage door ; the
coachman stiffened himself on his box; then he re-
laxed ; the footman drooped, and even wandered aside.
There came a moment when at some signal the car-
riage drove quite away from the portal and waited near
the gate of the stable -yard; it drove back, and the
spectators redoubled their attention. Nothing happen-
ed, and some of them dropped off. At last an inde-
scribable significance expressed itself in the official
group at the door; a man in a high hat and dress-coat
hurried out ; a footman hurried to meet him ; they spoke
inaudibly together. The footman mounted to his place ;
the coachman gathered up his reins and drove rapidly

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out of the hotel-yard, down the street, round the comer,
out of fiight. The man in the tall hat and dress-coat
went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved;
the statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evi-
dently the Hoheit of Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prus-
sia, was not going to take the air.

" My dear, this is humiliating/'

" Not at all ! I wouldn't have missed it for any-
thing. Think how near we came to seeing them !"

" I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them.
But to hang roimd here in this plebeian abeyance, and
then to be defeated and defrauded at lastl I wonder
how long this sort of thing is going on ?"

"What thing?"

" This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom
Foolery of the Ages."

" I don't know what you mean. I'm sure it's very
natural to want to see a prince."

" Only too natural. It's so deeply founded in nat-
ure that after denying royalty by word and deed for
a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier for it than
anybody else. Perhaps we may come back to it !"

"Nonsense!"

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower
of the hotel, languidly curling and uncurling in the
bland evening air, as it had over a thousand years of
stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous
republics of the Middle Ages had perished, and the
commonwealths of later times had passed like fever
dreams. That dull, inglorious empire had antedated
or outlived Venice and Gtenoa, Florence and Siena, the
England of Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadholders,
and the France of many revolutions, and all the fleet-
ing democracies which sprang from these.

March began to ask himself how his curiosity dif-

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f ered from that of the Europeans about him ; then he
became aware that these had detached themselves, and
left him exposed to the presence of a fellow-country-
man. It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turn-
ed upon March with hilarious recognition. "Hello!
Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hang-
ing round here for a sight of these kings. Well, wc
don't have a great many of 'em, and it's natural we
shouldn't want to miss any. But now, you Eastern
fellows, you go to Europe every sinnmer, and yet you
don't seem to get enough of 'em. Think it's human
nature, or did it get so ground into us in the old times
that we can't get it out, no difference what we say ?"

" That's very much what I've been asking myself,"
said March. " Perhaps it's any kind of show. We'd
wait nearly as long for the President to come out,
wouldn't we ?"

" I reckon we would. But we wouldn't for his
nephew or his second cousin."

" Well, they wouldn't be in the way of the succes-
sion.

" I guess you're right." The lowan seemed better
satisfied with March's philosophy than March felt him-
self, and he could not forbear adding:

" But I don't deny that we should wait for the Presi-
dent because he's a kind of king, too. I don't know
that we shall ever get over wanting to see kings of some
kind. Or at least my wife won't. May I present you
to Mrs. March ?"

" Happy to meet you, Mrs. IVCarch," said the lowan.
" Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson. I'm the fool in my
family, and I know just how you feel about a chance
like this. I don't mean that you're — ^"

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs.
March said, with one of her unexpected likings: "I

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understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would rather be our
kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for
the sight of a king/'

" Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson,'^ said March.

" Indeed, indeed,'* said the lady, " I'd like to see a
king, too, if it didn't take all night. Good-evening,"
she said, turning her husband about with her, as if she
suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March and
was not going to have it.

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despair-
ingly : " The trouble with me is that when I do get a
chance to talk English, there's such a flow of language
it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'm
landing."

There were several kings and their kindred at Carls-
bad that summer. One day the Duchess of Orleans
drove over from Marienbad, attended by the Duke on
his bicycle. After luncheon, they reappeared for a mo-
ment before mounting to her carriage with their secre-
taries: two yoimg French gentlemen whose dress and
bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exacting passion
for an aristocratic air in their order. The Duke was
fat and fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess
fatter, though not so fair, as became a Hapsburg, but
they were both more plebeian - looking than their re-
tainers, who were slender as well as young, and as
perfectly appointed as English tailors could imagine
them.

" It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of High-
hotes," March declared, " to look their own consequence
personally ; they have to leave that, like everything else,
to their inferiors."

By a happy hetcrophemy of Mrs. March's the Ger-
man Hoheit had now become Highhote, which was
so much more descriptive that they had permanently

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adopted it, and found comfort to their republican
pride in the mockery which it poured upon the feudal
structure of society. They applied it with a certain
compunction, however, to the Kling of Servia, who came
a few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such
a young King, and of such a little country. They
watched for him from the windows of the reading-
room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the
three sides of the square before the hotel, and the two
plain public carriages which brought the King and his
suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the proprietor
and some civic dignitaries received him. His mod-
erated approach, so little like that of royally on the
stage, to which Americans are used, allowed Mrs.
March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant,
amiable - looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign
she was ambuscading. Then no appeal to her prin-
ciples could keep her from peeping through the read-
ing-room door into the rotunda, where the King gra-
ciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and
the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator. She
was destined to see him so often afterward that she
scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and sup-
ping by that of the simple potentate, who had his
meals in one of the public rooms, with three gentle-
men of his suite, in sack-coats like himself, after the
informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that suuMuer
to be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a success-
ful rebellion, was at the opera one night with some of
his faithful followers. Bumamy had offered Mrs.
March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and
her husband with him, places in a box; but after she
eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished her to ad-
vise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and

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her father to join them. " Why not ?" she returned,
with an arching of the eyebrows.

" Why," he said, " perhaps I had better make a clean
breast of it."

** Perhaps you had," she said, and they both laughed,
though he laughed with a knot between his eyes.

" The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat exactly.
It's Mr. Stoller's." At the surprise in her face he
hurried on. " He's got back his first letter in the pa-
per, and he's so much pleased with the way he reads
in print that he wants to celebrate."

" Yes," said Mrs. March, non-committally.

Bumamy laughed again. "But he's bashful, and
he isn't sure that you would all take it in the right
way. He wants you as friends of mine ; and he hasn't
quite the courage to ask you himself."

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she
said : " That's very nice of him. Then he's satisfied
with — ^with your help ? I'm glad of that."

" Thank you. He's met the Triscoes, and he thought
it would be pleasant to you if they went, too."

" Oh, certainly."

"He thought," Bumamy went on, with the air of
feeling his way, " that we might all go to the opera,
and then — then go for a little supper afterward at
Schwarzkopf's."

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can
sup so late as ten o'clock; as the opera begins at six,
and is over at half -past eight, none but the wildest
roisterers frequent the place.

" Oh !" said Mrs. March. " I don't know how a late
supper would agree with my husband's cure. I should
have to ask him."

"We could make it very hygienic," Bumamy ex-
plained.

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In repeating his invitation she blamed Bumamys
nncandor so much that ^larch took his part, as per-
haps she intended, and said, " Oh, nonsense,'^ and
that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and
General Triscoe accepted as promptly for himself and
his daughter. That made six people, Bumamy counted
up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not
room for Mrs. Adding and her son ; he would have liked
to ask them.

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with
her husband alone, when they took two florin seats in
the orchestra for the comedy. The comedy always be-
gan half an hour earlier than the opera, and they
had a five-o'clock supper at the Theatre-Caf6 before
they went, and they got to sleep by nine o'clock ; now
they would be up till half-past ten at least, and that
orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for
hinL But still she liked being there; and Miss Tris-
coe made her take the best seat; Bumamy and Stdller
made the older men take the other seats beside the
ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they
wished to see, as people do in the back of a box. Stol-
ler was not much at ease in evening dress, but he bore
himself with a dignity which was not perhaps so gloomy
as it looked ; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his
way, and required Miss Triscoe to admire him. As
for Bumamy's beauty, it was not necessary to insist
upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;
and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of
a more patrician presence than this yet unprinted con-
tributor to Every Other Week. He and Stoller seemed
on perfect terms ; or else in his joy he was able to hide
the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the
first time she saw them together, and which had never
been quite absent from his manner in StoUer's pres-

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ence. Her husband always denied that it existed, or,
if it did, that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to
get on common ground with an inferior whom fortune
had put over him.

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to
bring him into the range of the general conversation.
He leaned over the ladies from time to time, and
pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house;
she was glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less
over her than over Miss Triscoe. He explained cer-
tain military figures in the boxes opposite, and certain
ladies of rank who did not look their rank ; Miss Tris-
coe, to Mrs. March's thinking, looked their united
ranks, and more; her dress was very simple, but of a
touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish ; her
beauty was dazzling.

^' Do you see that old fellow in the comer chair just
behind the orchestra ?" asked Bumamy. " He's ninety-
six years old, and he comes to the theatre every night,
and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises, and sleeps
through till the end of the act."

" How dear I" said the girl, leaning forwad to fix the
nonagenarian with her glasses, while many other glasses
converged upon her. " Oh, wouldn't you like to know
him, Mr. March?"

" I should consider it a liberal education. They have
brought these things to a perfect system in Europe.
There is nothing to make life pass smoothly like in-
flexible constancy to an entirely simple custom. My
dear," he added to his wife, " I wish we'd seen this
sage before. He'd have helped us through a good many
hours of unintelligible comedy. I'm always coming as
Bumamy's guest, after this."

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his tri-
umph, and casting an eye about the theatre to cap it,

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he caught sight of that other potentate. He whis-
pered, joyfully, "Ah! We've got two kings here to-
night," and he indicated in a box of their tier, just
across from that where the King of Servia sat, the
well-known face of the King of New York.

" He isn't bad - looking," said March, handing his
glass to General Triscoe. " I've not seen many kings
in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and ex-sov-
ereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once,
when I was staying a month in Venice; but I don't
think they any of them looked the part better. I sup-
pose he has his dream of recurring power like the rest."

" Dream !" said General Triscoe, with the glass at
his eyes. " He's dead sure of it."

" Oh, you don't really mean that !"

" I don't know why I should have changed my
mind."

" Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles
II. just before he was called back to England, or Na-
poleon in the last moments of Elba. It's better than
that. The thing is almost unique ; it's a new situation
in history. Here's a sovereign who has no recognized
function, no legal status, no objective existence. He
has no sort of public being, except in the affection of
his subjects. It took an upheaval little short of an
earthquake to unseat him. His rule, as we under-
stand it, was bad for all classes; the poor suffered
more than the rich; the people have now had three
years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man
has such a hold upon the masses that he is going home
to win the cause of oppression at the head of the op-
pressed. When he's in power again, he will be as sub-
jective as ever, with the power of civic life and death,
and an idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the
execution of his will."

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^' WeVe only begun/* said the general. " This kind
of king is municipal now ; but he's going to be national.
And then, good-bye, Republic !''

" The only thing like it," March resumed, too in-
credulous of the evil future to deny himself the es-
thetic pleasure of the parallel, " is the rise of the
Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not
mere manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of
public office, with some sort of legislated tenure of it
The King of New York is sovereign by force of will
alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission
of the majority. Is our national dictator to be of the
same nature and quality V^

" It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn't it V^

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention
which women pay to any sort of inquiry which is not
personal. Stoller had scarcely spoken yet; he now
startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindic-
tive force, ^' Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're
willing to let him ?''

" Yes," said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head
toward March. " That's what we must ask ourselves
more and more."

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over
his shoulder at Stoller. "Well, I don't know. Do
you think it's quite right for a man to use an imjust
power, even if others are willing that he should ?"

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if
surprised on the point of saying that he thought just
this. He asked instead, " What's wrong about it t"

"Well, that's one of those things that have to be
felt, I suppose. But if a man came to you, and offer-
ed to be your slave for a certain consideration — say a
comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't too
hard — should you feel it morally right to accept the

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oflFer? I don't say think it right, for there might be
a kind of logic for it/'

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and
before he had made any response the curtain rose.

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by
night from one of the many bridges which span the
Tepl in its course through the town. If it is a starry
night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted
firmament in its bosom, to which the lamps along its
shores and in the houses on either side contribute a
planetary splendor of their own. By nine o'clock
everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that
dead hour; the few feet shuffling stealthily through
the Alte Wiese whisper caution of silence to those
issuing with a less guarded tread from the opera ; the
little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and
mute as the restaurants across the way which serve
meals in them by day; the whole place is as forsaken
as other cities at midnight. People get quickly home
to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy,
they slip into the Theatre-Cafe, where the sleepy Frau-
leins serve them, in an exemplary drowse, with plates
of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseous waters of
Giesshiibl. Few are of the bold badness which delights
in a supper at Schwarzhopf's, and even these are glad
of the drawn curtains which hide their orgy from the
chance passer.

The invalids of Bumamy's party kept together,
strengthening themselves in a mutual purpose not to
be tempted to eat anything which was not strictly
kurgemdss. Mrs. [March played upon the interest which
each of them felt in his own case so artfully that she
kept them talking of their cure, and left Bumamy and
Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by which they
profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against

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tlio parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the
water, and be alone together. The stream shone above
and below, and found its way out of and into the dark-
ness under the successive bridges; the town climbed
into the night with lamp-lit windows here and there,
till the woods of the hill-sides darkened down to meet
it, and fold it in an embrace from which some white
edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.

He tried to make her think they could see that great
iron crucifix which watches over it day and night from
its piny cliff. He had a fancy for a poem, very im-
pressionistic, which should convey the notion of the
crucifix's vigil. He submitted it to her; and they re-
mained talking till the others had got out of sight and
hearing ; and she was letting him keep the hand on her
arm which he had put there to hold her from falling
over the parapet, when they were both startled by
approaching steps, and a voice calling, "Look here!
Who's running this supper party, anyway ?"

His wife had detached March from her group for
the mission, as soon as she felt that the young people
were abusing her kindness. They answered him with
hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, " Why, it's Mr.
StoUer's treat, you know."

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequious-
ly met the party on the threshold and bowed them into
a pretty inner room, with a table set for their supper,
StoUer had gained courage to play the host openly. Ho
appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would
have put his daughter next to him, if the girl had not
insisted upon Mrs. March's having the place, and go-
ing herself to sit next to March, whom she said she
had not been able to speak a word to the whole even-
ing. But she did not talk a great deal to him; he
smiled to find how soon he dropped out of the con-

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versation, and Bumamy, from his greater remoteness
across the table, dropped into it. He really preferred
the study of StoUer, whose instinct of a greater world-
ly quality in the Triscoes interested him ; he could see
him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying
to Mrs. March, and now to what Burnamy was saying
to Miss Triscoe ; his strong, selfish face, as he turned it
on the young people, expressed a mingled grudge and
greed that was very curious.

StoUer^s courage, which had come and gone at mo-
ments throughout, rose at the end, and while they
lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten, he said,
in the sort of helpless offence he had with Bumamy,
" What's the reason we can't all go out to-morrow to
that old castle you was talking about ?"

" To Engelhaus ? I don't know any reason, as far as
I'm concerned," answered Bumamy ; but he refused the
initiative offered him, and StoUer was obliged to ask
March :

"You heard about it?"

" Yes." General Triscoe was listening, and March
added for him, "It was the hold of an old robber
baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and it's
very picturesque, I believe."

" It sounds promising," said the general. " Where
is it?"

" Isn't to-morrow your mineral bath ?" Mrs. March
interposed between her husband and temptation.

" No ; the day after. Why, it's about ten or twelve
miles out on the old postroad that Napoleon took for
Prague."

" Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it," said

the general, and he alone of the company lighted a

cigar. He was decidedly in favor of the excursion,

and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the

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effect of using for his pleasure as if he were doing
him a favor. They were six, and two carriages would
take them — a two^panner for four, and a one-spanner
for two ; they could start directly after dinner, and get
home in time for supper.

StoUer asserted himself to say : " That's all right,
then. I want you to be my guest, and I'll see about
the carriages." He turned to Bumamy: "Will you
order them ?"

" Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dry-
ness, " the portier will get them."

" I don't understand why General Triscoe was so
willing to accept. Surely, he can't like that man 1" said
Mrs. March to her husband in their own room.

" Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The gen-
eral seems to me capable of letting even an enemy
serve his turn. Why didn't you speak, if you didn't
want to go ?"

"Why didn't you?"

" I wanted to go."

" And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go
alone ; I could see that she wished to go."

" Do you think Bumamy did ?"

" He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must
have realized that he would be with Miss Triscoe the
whole afternoon."

If Bumamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the
one-spanner, and the others followed in the two-span-
ner, it was not from want of politeness on the part of
the young people in offering to give up their places
to each of their elders in turn. It would have been
grotesque for either March or Stoller to drive with
the girl ; for her father it was apparently no question,
after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the
seat in the one -spanner; and he accepted the place

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beside Mrs. March on the back seat of the two-span-
ner without demur. He asked her leave to smoke, and
then he scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the
two men in front of him almost incessantly, haranguing
them upon the inferiority of our conditions and the
futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of be-
wildering the cruder arrogance of StoUer, who could
have got on with Triscoe's contempt for the worthless-
ness of our working^lasses, but did not know what to
do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their
employers. He accused some of StoUer's most honored
and envied capitalists of being the source of our worst
corruptions, and guiltier than the voting-<5attle whom
they bought and sold.

" I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we
go at it the right way,'^ Stoller said, diverging for the
sake of the point he wished to bring in. " I believe
in having the government run on business principles.
They've got it here in Carlsbad already, just the right
sort of thing, and it works. I been lookin' into it, and
I got this young man, yonder" — he twisted his hand
in the direction of the one-spanner — " to help me put
it in shape. I believe it's going to make our folks
think, the best ones among them. Here !" He drew a
newspaper out of his pocket, folded to show two col-
umns in their full length, and handed it to Triscoe,
who took it with no great eagerness and began to run
his eye over it " You tell me what you think of that.
I've put it out for a kind of a feeler. I got some money
in that paper, and I just thought I'd let our people see
how a city can be managed on business principles."

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to fol-
low his thought while he read, and keep him up to
the work, and he ignored the Marches so entirely that

tbey began in self-defence to talk with each other.

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Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long
irregular curves to the breezy upland where the great
high-road to Prague ran through fields of harvest* They
had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the
serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-
blue and grew straight as stalks of grain ; and now on
either side the farms opened imder a sky of unwonted
cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which
the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in
red bodices were binding, alternated with ribbons of
yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of beets and
turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land.
In the meadows the peasants were piling their carta
with heavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks,
and the men giving themselves the lighter labor of or-
dering the load. From the upturned earth, where there
ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few
sombre ravens rose. But they could not rob the scene
of its gayety; it smiled in the simshine with colors
which vividly followed the slope of the land till they
were dimmed in the forests on the far-oflf mountains.
Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in
the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the dis-
tant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the
hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which charm-
ed March back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense
of his wife's presence and answered her vaguely. She
talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the
wives of absent-minded men learn to resign themselves.
They were both roused from their vagary by the voice
of General Triscoe. He was handing back the folded
newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at
him over his glasses, " I should like to see what your
contemporaries have to say to all that.^^

" Well, sir," Stoller returned, " maybe I'll have the

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chance to show yon. They got my instructions over
there to send everything to me."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the
landscape as landscape. They agreed that the human
interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all ;
but they ignored the peasants in the fields and mead-
ows, who were no more to them than the driver on the
box, or the people in the two-spanner behind. They
were talking of the. hero and heroine of a novel they had
both read, and he was saying, " I suppose you think he
was justly punished."

" Pimished ?" she repeated. " Why, they got mar-
ried, after all !"

" Yes, but you could see that they were not going to
be happy."

" Then it really seems to me that she was punished,
too."

"Well, yes; you might say that. The author
couldn't help that."

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said :
" I always thought the author was rather hard on the
hero. The girl was very exacting."

" Why," said Bumamy, " I supposed that women
hated anything like deception in men too much to tol-
erate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn't de-
ceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that
worse ?"

" Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him
for deceiving her."

"Oh!"

•"He might have had to do that. She wouldn't
have minded his fibbing outright so much, for then
it wouldn't have seemed to come from his nature.
But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and
didn't say a word to prevent her, of course it was

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worse. It showed something weak, something coward-
ly in him/^

Bumamy gave a little cynical laugh. "I suppose
it did. But don't you think it's rather rough, expect-
ing us to have all the kinds of courage ?"

" Yes, it is," she assented. " That is why I say
she was too exacting. But a man oughtn't to defend
him."

Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it now.
" Another woman might ?"

" itfo. She might excuse him."

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was
rather far behind, and he spoke to their driver bid-
ding him go slowly till it caught up with them. By
the time it did so, they were so close to the ruin that
they could distinguish the lines of its wandering and
broken walls. Ever since they had climbed from the
wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the open
plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater de-
tail. The detached mound of rock on which it stood
rose like an island in the midst of the plain, and com-
manded the highways in every direction.

" I believe," Bumamy broke out, with a bitterness
apparently relevant to the ruin alone, "that if you
hadn't required any quarterings of nobility from him,
Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron.
He's a robber baron by nature now, and he wouldn't
have any scruple in levying tribute on us here in our
one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair and his
cross-bowmen were not on a strike. But they would
be on a strike probably, and then he would lock them
out and employ none but non-union cross-bowmen."

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the
morality as well as the civility of his employer, she
did not take him more seriously than he meant, ap-

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parently, for she smiled as she said, " I don't see how
you can have anything to do with him, if you feel so
about him/'

" Oh/' Bumamy replied, in kind, " he buys my pov-
erty and not my will. And perhaps if I thought bet-
ter of myself, I should respect him more."

'^ Have you been doing something very wicked ?"

" WTiat should you have to say to me if I had ?" he
bantered.

" Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you,"
she mocked back.

They turned a comer of the highway, and drove
rattling through a village street up a long slope to the
rounded hill which it crowned. A church at its base
looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which
seemed to hide a darkling mind within, came out of
the church and locked it behind him. He proved to
be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's
claims upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after
a moment, their wishes in respect to the castle, and
showed the path that led to it; at the top, he said,
they would find a custodian of the ruins who would
admit them.

The path to the castle slanted upward across the
shoulder of the hill to a certain point, and there some
rude stone steps mounted more directly. Wilding lilac-
bushes, as if from some forgotten garden, bordered the
ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean
bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf;
but Nature spreads no such lavish feast in wood Or
field in the Old World as she spoils us with in the
New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to
be all her store, and man must make the most of them.

Miss Triscoe seemed to find flowers enough in the sim-

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pie bouquet which Burnamy put together for her. She
took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might
have both hands for her skirt, and so did him two
favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns
the ruin opened a gate for the party at the top, and
levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon them for its
maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended
from robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked
it to pieces in the sixteenth century; three hundred
years later the present owner restored it; and now its
broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with
brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin
satisfyingly permanent. The walls were not of great
extent, but such as they were they enclosed several
dungeons and a chapel, all imdergroimd, and a cisterji
which once enabled the barons and their retainers to
water their wine in time of siege.

From that height they could overlook the neighbor-
ing highways in every direction, and could bring a mer-
chant train to, with a shaft from a cross-bow, or a shot
from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General Tris-
coe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the
unique position, which he found expressive of the past
and yet suggestive of the present It was more a dif-
ference in method than anything else that distinguished
the levy of customs by the authorities then and now.
What was the essential difference between taking trib-
ute of travellers passing on horseback and collecting
dues from travellers arriving by steamer? They did
not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be a
proof of progress that they no longer fought the cus-
toms officials.

" Then you believe in free trade,^^ said Stoller, se-
verely.

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" No. I am just inquiring which is the best way of
enforcing the tariff laws.''

" I saw in the Paris Chronicle last night," said Miss
Triscoe, " that people are kept on the docks now for
hours, and ladies cry at the way their things are tmn-
bled over by the inspectors."

" It's shocking," said Mrs. March, magisterially.

" It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal
times," her husband resumed. "But I'm glad the
travellers make no resistance. I'm opposed to private
war as much as I am to free trade.'^

" It all comes round to the same thing at last," said
General Triscoe. " Your precious humanity — "

" Oh, I don't claim it exclusively," March protested.

" Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man
that has lost his road. He thinks he is finding his
way out, but he is merely rounding on his course and
coming back to where he started.'^

Stoller said, " I think we ought to make it so rough
for them over here that they will come to America
and set up, if they can't stand the duties."

" Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,"
March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to
answer. He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by
which Bumamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated them-
selves from the discussion, and strayed off to another
comer of the ruin, where they sat down on the turf
in the shadow of the wall ; a thin, upland breeze drew
across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away
from the height, and then rose again on every side in
carpet -like fields and in long curving bands, whose
parallel colors passed unblended into the distance.
" I don't suppose," Bumamy said, " that life ever
does much better than this, do you ? I feel like knock-

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ing on a piece of wood and saying ^Unberufen/ I
might knock on your bouquet; that's wood/'

" It would spoil the flowers/' she said, looking down
at them in her belt She looked up and their eyes
m«t.

" I wonder," he said, presently, " what makes us al-
ways have a feeling of dread when we are happy ?"

" Do you have that, too ?" she asked.

" Yes. Perhaps it's because we know that change
must come, and it must be for the worse."

"That must be it. I never thought of it before,
though."

" If we had got so far in science that we could pre-
dict psychological weather, and could know twenty-
four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold
wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and
tears beforehand — it may come to that."

" I hope it won't. I'd rather not know when I was
to be happy ; it would spoil the pleasure ; and wouldn't
be any compensation when it was the other way."

A shadow fell across them, and Bumamy glanced
roimd to see StoUer looking down at them, with a slant
of the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief.
" Oh ! Have a turf, Mr. StoUer ?" he called, gayly, up
to him.

" I guess we've seen about all there is," he answered.
" Hadn't we better be going ?" He probably did not
mean to be mandatory.

" All right," said Bumamy, and he turned to speak
to Miss Triscoe again without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the
hill where the weird sacristan was waiting to show
them the cold, bare interior, and to accoimt for its
newness with the fact that the old church had been
burnt, and this one built only a few years before.

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TLen he locked the doors after them, and ran forward
to open against their coming the chapel of the village
cemetery, which they were to visit after they had forti-
fied themselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunchback maid; and
she told them who lived in the chief house of the vil-
lage. It was uncommonly pretty, where all the houses
were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as
the dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the
great man of the place. March admired the cat which
rubbed against her skirt while she stood and talked, and
she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they,
wrought upon the envy of her brother, so that he ran
off to the garden and came back with two fat, sleepy-
eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm across
each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.

" Oh, give him something !'* Mrs. March entreated.
" He's such a dear.''

" No, no 1 I am not going to have my litle hunch-
back and her cat outdone," he refused; and then he
was about to yield.

" Hold on !" said Stoller, assuming the host. " I got
the change."

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March
had meant her husband to reward his naivete with half
a florin at least ; but he seemed to feel that he had now
ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself
in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel ;
he made Miss Triscoe let him carry her jacket when
she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and
the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three cen-
turies ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the trian-
gular form of the structure and the decorative details.
Everything is three-cornered: the whole chapel, to be-
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gin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the
middle of it, and each of the three side - altars. The
clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German
version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic
at the time; the carving is coarse, and the color harsh
and unsoftened by years, though it is broken and ob-
literated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used
for anything but funeral services, and he led the way
out into the cemetery, where he wished to display the
sepultural devices. The graves here were planted with
flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies ;
but a space fenced apart from the rest held a few neg-
lected mounds overgrown with weeds and brambles.
This space, he said, was for suicides ; but to March it
was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs
in consecrated ground where the stones had photographs
of the dead on porcelain let into them. One was the
picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the
wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed
to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said,
with nothing of irony, the magnate was married again,
and lived in that prettiest house of the village. He
seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest
the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less
apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapel repre-
senting a Gethsemane, with the figure of Christ pray-
ing and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much
celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not
a novelty to his party; still, from its surroundings, it
had a fresh pathos, and March tried to make him im-
derstand that they appreciated it. He knew that his
wife wished the poor man to think he had done them
a great favor in showing it ; he had been touched with
all the vain shows of grief in the poor, ugly little place ;

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most of all he had felt the exile of those who had taken
their own lives and were parted in death from the more
patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them.
With a curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that
the older members of the party, who in the course of
nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from
its shows; but the young girl and the young man had
not borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped
from the place, somewhere outside the gate. Was it
the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with
death which nature brings to life at last, or was it mere-
ly the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of tough-
ened nerves ?

" That is all V^ he asked of the spectral sacristan.

" That is all," the man said, and March felt in his
pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had
done them ; it ought to be something handsome.

" No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture. " Your
money a^nH good."

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of
the man, who regarded them with a disappointment
none the less cruel because it was so patient. In
France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he
would have frankly said it was too little; here, he
merely looked at the money and whispered a sad
"Danke."

Bumamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy
bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for
the elders to get into their two-spanner.

"Oh, have I lost my glove in there 1" said Mrs.
March, looking at her hands and s\ich parts of her
dress as a glove might cling to.

"Let me go and find it for you!" Bumamy en-
treated.

" Well," she consented, and she added, " If the sac-
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ristan has found it^ give him something for me — some-
thing really handsome, poor fellow/'

As Bumamy passed her, she let him see that she
had hoth her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him
for his instant smile of intelligence: some men would
have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her
hand. He came back directly, saying, " No, he didn't
find it"

She laughed, and held both gloves up. " No won-
der ! I had it all the time. Thank you ever so much.''

" How are we going to ride back f " asked StoUer.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled
impenetrably. No one else spoke, and Mrs. March
said, with placid authority, " Oh, I think the way we
came is best."

" Did that absurd creature " — she apostrophized her
husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival
at Pupp's — " think I was going to let him drive back
with Agatha?"

" I wonder," said March, " if that's what Burnamy
calls her now ?"

" I shall despise him if it isn't."

Burnamy took up his mail to StoUer after the supper
which they had eaten in a silence natural with two men
who have been off on a picnic together. He did not
rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and
the young man did not sit down after putting his let-
ters before him. He said, with an effort of forcing
himself to speak at once, " I have looked through the
papers, and there is something that I think you ought
to see."

" What do you mean ?" said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to
pages where certain articles were strongly circum-

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scribed in ink. The papers varied, but their editorials
did not — in purport, at least. Some were grave and
some were gay; one indignantly denounced; another
affected an ironical bewilderment; the third simply
had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They all, how-
ever, treated his letter on the city government of Carls-
bad as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper
which had fun with him gleefully congratulated the
dangerous classes on the accession of the Honorable
Jacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with
parted lips and gathering drips of perspiration on his
upper lip, while Bumamy waited on foot. He flung
the papers all down at last. ^^ Why, they're a pack
of fools ! They don't know what they're talking about I
I want city government carried on on business prin-
ciples, by the people, for the people. / don't care what
they say ! I know I'm right, and I'm going ahead on
this line if it takes all — " The note of defiance died
out of his voice at the sight of Bumamy's pale face.
" What's the matter with you ?"

" There's nothing the matter with me."

" Do you mean to tell me it is " — he could not bring
himself to use the word — " what they say ?"

" I suppose," said Bumamy, with a dry mouth, " it's
what you may call municipal socialism."

Stoller jumped from his seat. " And you knew it
when you let me do it ?"

" I supposed you knew what you were about."

" It's a lie !" Stoller advanced upon him wildly,
and Bumamy took a step backward.

" Look out!" shouted Bumamy. " You never asked
me anything about it You told me what you wanted
done, and I did it. How could I believe you were sucli
an Ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you

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were talking about ?'' He added, in cynical contempt :
" But you needn't worry. You can make it right with
the managers by spending a little more money than you
expected to spend."

StoUer started as if the word money reminded him
of something. " I can take care of myself, young man.
How much do I owe you V^

" Nothing !" said Bumamy, with an effort for gran-
deur which failed him.

The next morning, as the Marches sat over their
coffee at the Posthof, he came dragging himself tow-
ard them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March
called, before he reached their table, " Why, Mr. Bur-
namy, what's the matter ?"

He smiled miserably. " Oh, I haven't slept very
well. May I have my coffee with you ? I want to tell
you something; I want you to make me. But I can't
speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!" he besought a
waitress going off with a tray near them. " Tell Lili,
please, to bring me some coffee — only coffee."

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which
was rainy, and the Marches helped him, but the poor
endeavor lagged wretchedly in the interval between the
ordering and the coming of the coffee. "Ah, thank
you, Lili," he said, with a humility which confirmed
Mrs. March in her instant belief that he had been offer-
ing himself to Miss Triscoe and been rejected. After
gulping his coffee, he turned to her : " I want to say
good-bye. I'm going away."

" From Carlsbad ?" asked Mrs. March, with a keen
distress.

The water came into his eyes. "Don't, donH bo
good to me, Mrs. March ! I can't stand it. But you
won't when you know."

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He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but ad-
dressing himself more and more to the intelligence of
March, who let him go on without question, and laid
a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her
about to prompt him. At the end, " That's all,'' he
said, huskily, and then he seemed to be waiting for
March's comment. He made none, and the young fel-
low was forced to ask, " Well, what do you think, Mr.
March?"

" What do you think yourself ?"

" I think I behaved badly," said Bumamy, and a
movement of protest from Mrs. March nerved him to
add : " I could make out that it was not my business
to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I
guess I ought to have stopped him, or given him a
chance to stop himself. I suppose I might have done
it, if he had treated me decently when I turned up a
day late, here ; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were
a hand in his buggy-works that had come in an hour
after the whistle sounded."

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone
in Mrs. March's eyes ; but her husband only looked the
more serious.

He asked, gently, " Do you oflFer that fact as an ex-
planation, or as a justification ?"

Bumamy laughed forlornl3% ^^ It certainly wouldn't
justify me. You might say that it made the case all
the worse for me." March forbore to say, and Bur-
namy went on : " But I didn't suppose they would
be onto him so quick, or perhaps at all. I thought —
if I thought anything — that it would amuse some of
the fellows in the oflice who know about those things."
He paused, and in March's continued silence he went
on : " The chance was one in a hundred that anybody
else would know where he had brought up."

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"But you let him take that chance," March sug-
gested.

" Yes, I let him take. it. Oh, you know how mixed
all these things are!"

" Yes."

" Of course, I didn't think it out at the time. But
I don't deny that I had a satisfaction in the notion of
the hornets' nest he was poking his thick head into.
It makes me sick, now, to think I had. I oughtn't to
have let him; he was perfectly innocent in it. After
the letter went, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't;
and then I took the chances, too. I don't believe he
could have ever got forward in politics; he's too hon-
est— or he isn't dishonest in the right way. But that
doesn't let me out. I don't defend myself! I did
wrong; I behaved badly. But I've suffered for it
I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come
to the worst, and felt like a murderer with his victim
when I've been alone with Stoller. WTien I could get
away from him I could shake it off, and even believe
that it hadn't happened. You can't think what a night-
mare it's been! Well, I've ruined Stoller politically,
but I ruined myself, too. I've spoiled my own life;
I've done what I can never explain to — to the people
I want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away
like the thief I am. Good-bye!" lie jumped to his
feet and put out his hand to March, and then to Mrs.
March.

"Why, you're not going away nowT^ she cried, in
a daze.

" Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-
o'clock train. I don't think I shall see you again."
He clung to her hand. " If you see — General Triscoe
— I wish you'd tell them I couldn't — that I had to —

that I was called away suddenly — Good-bye!" He

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pressed her hand and dropped it, and mixed with the
crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with a final ap-
peal to March : " Should you— do you think I ought
to see Stoller, and — and tell him I don't think I used
him fairly V^

" You ought to know — '* March began.

But before he could say more Bumamy said,
" You're right," and was off again.

" Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear !" Mrs.
March lamented.

"I wish," he said, "if our boy ever went wrong
that some one would be as true to him as I was to
that poor fellow. He condemned himself; and he was
right ; he has behaved very badly."

" You always overdo things so, when you act right-
eously !"

"Now, Isabel!"

" Oh yes, I know what you will say. But / should
have tempered justice with mercy."

Her nerves tingled with pity for Bumamy, but in
her heart she was glad that her husband had had
strength to side with him against himself, and she
was proud of the forbearance with which he had done
it. In their earlier married life she would have con-
fidently taken the initiative on all moral questions.
She still believed that she was better fitted for their
decision by her Puritan tradition and her New Eng-
land birth, but once in a great crisis when it seemed
a question of their living she had weakened before it,
and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met
the issue with courage and conscience. She could
not believe he did so by inspiration, but she had
since let him take the brunt of all such issues and
the responsibility. He made no reply, and she
said: "I suppose you'll admit now there was al-

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ways something peculiar in the poor boy's manner to
StoUer."

He would confess no more than that there ought
to have been. " I don't see how he could stagger
through with that load on his conscience. I'm not
sure I like his being able to do so."

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared
with him, but she said : " I wonder how far it has gone
with him and Miss Triscoe ?"

" Well, from his wanting you to give his message to
the general in the plural — "

" Don't laugh ! It's wicked to laugh ! It's heart-
less !" she cried, hvsterically. " What will he do, poor
fellow?"

" I've an idea that he will light on his feet — some-
how. But, at any rate, he's doing the right thing in
going to own up to Stoller."

"Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller! Don't
speak to me of Stoller !"

Bumamy found the Bird of Prey, as he no longer
had the heart to call him, walking up and down in his
room like an eagle caught in a trap. He erected his
crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow
came in at his loudly shouted '' Herein !"

" What do you want ?" he demanded, brutally.

This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it
more loathsome. He answered not much less brutal-
ly, " I want to tell you that I think I used you badly,
that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to
blame." He could have added, "Curse you!" with-
out change of tone.

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower
teeth like a dog's when he snarls. " You want to get
back!"

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"No/' said Bumamy, mildly, and with increasing
sadness as he spoke. " I don't want to get hack. Noth-
ing would induce me. I'm going away on the first
train."

"Well, you're notr shouted StoUer. "You've lied
me into this — "

" Look out !" Bumamy turned white.

" Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool my-
self, as you say?" Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt
himself weaken through his wrath. " Well, then, you
got to lie me out of it I been going over the damn
thing all night — and you can do it for me. I hnow
you can do it," he gave way in a plea that was almost
a whimper. " Look here ! You see if you can't. I'll
make it all right with you. I'll pay you whatever you
think is right — whatever you say."

" Oh !" said Bumamy, in otherwise unutterable dis-
gust.

"You fcin/' Stoller went on, breaking down more
and more into his adopted Hoosier, in the stress of
his anxiety. " I know you kin, Mr. Bumamy." He
pushed the paper containing his letter into Bumamy's
hands, and pointed out a succession of marked pas-
sages. " There ! And here ! And this place ! Don't
you see how you could make out that it meant some-
thing else, or was just ironical ?" He went on to prove
how the text might be given the complexion he wished,
and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not im-
possibly out. " I can't put it in writing as well as you ;
but I've done all the work, and all you've got to do is
to give it some of them turns of yours. I'll cable the
fellows in our office to say I've been misrepresented,
and that my correction is coming. We'll get it into
shape here together, and then I'll cable that. I don't
care for the money. And I'll get our counting-room to

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eee this scoundrel " — ^he picked up the paper that had
had fun with him — " and fix him all right, so that he'll
ask for a suspension of public opinion, and — You
see, don't you ?"

The thing did appeal to Bumamy. If it could be
done, it would enable him to make Stoller the repara-
tion he longed to make him more than anything else
in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gen-
tly, almost tenderly, " It might be done, Mr. Stoller.
But / couldn't do it. It wouldn't be honest — for me."

"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper
into a wad and flung it into Burnamy's face. " Hon-
est, you damn humbug! You let me in for this, when
you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help
me out because it a'n't honest! Get out of my room,
and get out quick l)efore I — "

He hurled himself toward Bumamy, who straight-
ened himself with, " If you dare !" He knew that he
was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller was
right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what
he had said in his letter, and of what Bumamy had let
him imply. He braved Stoller's onset, and he left his
presence untouched, but feeling as little like a moral
hero as he well could.

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General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an
elderly man after a day's pleasure, and in the self-re-
proach of a pessimist who has lost his point of view
for a time and has to work back to it. He began at
the belated breakfast with his daughter when she said,
after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bower
where they breakfasted at their hotel when they did
not go to the Posthof, " DidnH you have a nice time
yesterday, papa ?"

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him
across the little iron table, as she lifted the pot to pom-
out his coffee.

" What do you call a nice time ?" he temporized, not
quite able to resist her gayety.

" Well, the kind of time / had/'

" Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass ?
I took cold in that old church, and the tea at that res-
taurant must have been brewed in a brass kettle. I
suffered all night from it. And that ass from Il-
linois— "

"Oh, poor papa! I couldnH go with Mr. StoUer
alone, but I might have gone in the two-spanner with
him and let you have Mr. and Mrs. March in the one-
spanner.'*

" I don't know. Their interest in each other isn't
so interesting to other people as they seem to think."

"Do you feel that way really, papa? Don't you
like their being so much in love still ?"

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" At their time of life ? Thank you ; it's bad enough
in young people/'

The girl did not answer ; she appeared altogether oc-
cupied in pouring out her father's coffee.

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of
it; but he said, as he put his cup down, ** / don't know
what they make this stuff of. I wish I had a cup of
good, honest American coffee."

" Oh, there's nothing like American food !" said his
daughter, with so much conciliation that he looked up
sharply.

But whatever he might have been going to say was
at least postponed by the approach of a serving-maid,
who brought a note to his daughter. She blushed a
little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:
" I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my
own which forbids me to look you in the face. If
you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs. March,
I have no heart to tell you."

Agatha read these mystifying words of Bumamy's
several times over in a silent absorption with them
which left her father to look after himself, and he
had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own
hand, and was reaching for the bread beside her be-
fore she came slowly back to a sense of his presence.
" Oh, excuse me, papa," she said, and she gave him
the butter. '' Here's a very 'strange letter from Mr.
Bumamy, which I think you'd better see." She held
the note across the table to him, and watched his face
as he read it.

After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over,
as people do with letters that puzzle them, in the vain
hope of something explanatory on the back. Then he
looked up and asked : '^ What do you suppose he's been
doing?"

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" I don't believe he's been doing anything. It's
something that Mr. Stoller's been doing to him."

" I shouldn^t infer that from his own words. What
makes you think the trouble is with StoUer?'^

"He said — ^he said yesterday — something about be-
ing glad to be through with him, because he disliked
him so much he was always afraid of wronging him.
And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him
believe that he's done wrong, and has worked upon him
till he does believe it."

" It proves nothing of the kind," said the general,
recurring to the note. After reading it again, he looked
keenly at her. " Am I to understand that you have
given him the right to suppose you would want to know
the worst — or the best of him ?"

The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against
her plate. She began : " No — "

" Then confound his impudence !" the general broke
out. " What business has he to write to you at all about
this?"

"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she re-
torted; and she met her father's eye courageously.
" He had a right to think we were his friends ; and
if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn^t
it manly of him to wish to tell us first himself?"

Her father could not say that it was not. But he
could and did say, very sceptically : " Stuff ! Now,
see here, Agatha, what are you going to do ?"

" I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then — "

" You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear,"
said her father, gently. " You've no right to give your-
self away to that romantic old goose." He put up his
hand to interrupt her protest. " This thing has got to
be gone to the bottom of. But you're not to do it. I
will see March myself. We must consider your dignity

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in this matter — and mine. And you may as well un-
derstand that I'm not going to have any nonsense. It's
got to be managed so that it can't be supposed we're
anxious about it, one way or the other, or that he was
authorized to write to you in this way — "

" No, no ! He oughtn't to have done so. He was
to blame. He couldn't have written to you, though,
papa 1"

"Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason
why we should let it be imderstood that he has writ-
ten to you. I will see March: and I will manage to
see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in the
reading-room at Pupt)'s, and — ^"

The Marches were, in fact, just coming in from their
breakfast at the Posthof, and he met them at the door
of Pupp's, where they all sat down on one of the iron
settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another
questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day
before, and to beat about the bush where Bumamy
lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting
him. " You knew," she said, " that Mr. Bumamy had
left us?"

" Left 1 Why ?" asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this
she found it best to trust her husband's poverty of in-
vention. She looked at him, and he answered for her
with a promptness that made her quake at first, but
finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing:
" He's had some trouble with Stoller." He went on to
tell the general just what the trouble was.

At the end the general grunted as from an uncer-
tain mind. " You think he's behaved badly."

" I think he's behaved foolishly — ^youthfully. But
I can understand how strongly he was tempted. He

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could say that he was not authorized to stop Stoller in
his mad career."

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her hus-
band's arm.

" I'm not so sure about that," said the general.

March added : " Since I saw him this morning, Fve
heard something that disposes me to look at his per-
formance in a friendlier light. It's something that
Stoller told me himself, to heighten my sense of
Bumamy's wickedness. He seems to have felt that I
ought to know what a serpent I was cherishing in
my bosom," and he gave Triscoe the facts of Buma-
my's injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false com-
plexion on the opinions he had allowed him ignorantly
to express.

The general grunted again. " Of course he had to
refuse, and he has behaved like a gentleman so far.
But that doesn't justify him in having let Stoller get
himself into the scrape."

" No," said March. " It's a tough nut for the cas-
uist to try his tooth on. And I must say I feel sorry
for Stoller."

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. "I
don't, one bit He was thoroughly selfish from first
to last. He has got just what he deserved."

" Ah, very likely," said her husband. " The ques-
tion is about Bumamy's part in giving him his deserts ;
he had to leave him to them, of course."

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter
of his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of no con-
cem to him. " I believe," he said, rising, " I'll have
a look at some of your papers," and he went into the
reading-room.

" Now," said Mrs. March, " he will go home and
poison that poor girl's mind. And you will have
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yourself to thaiik for prejudicing him against Bur-
namy."

" Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear V^ he
teased ; hut he was really too sorry for the whole affair,
which he nevertheless enjoyed as an ethical problem.

The general looked so little at the papers that be-
fore March went off for his morning walk he saw him
come out of the reading-room and take his way down
the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daugh-
ter, and reported Bumamy's behavior with entire ex-
actness. He dwelt upon his making the best of a bad
business in refusing to help StoUer out of it, dishonor-
ably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it
was a bad business.

" Now, you know all about it," he said at the end,
" and I leave the whole thing to you. If you prefer,
you can see Mrs. March. I don't know but I'd rather
you'd satisfy yourself — "

" I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would
go back of you in that way ? I am satisfied now."

Instead of Bumamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now
breakfasted with the Marches at the Posthof, and the
boy was with March throughout the day a good deal.
He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by
March's greater wisdom and experience, and did his
best to anticipate his opinions and conform to his con-
clusions. This was not easy, for sometimes he could
not conceal from himself that March's opinions were
whimsical and his conclusions fantastic; and he could
not always conceal from March that he was matching
them with Kenby's on some points, and suffering from
their divergence. He came to join the sage in his early
visit to the springs, and they walked up and down
talking; and they went off together on long strolls in

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which Rose was proud to bear him company. He was
patient of the absences from which he was often an-
swered, and he learned to distinguish between the ear-
nest and the irony of which March's replies seemed to
be mixed. He examined him upon many features of
German civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of
women in it; and upon this his philosopher was less
satisfactory than he could have wished him to be. He
tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the pain-
ful stress of questions which he found so afflicting him-
self; but in the matter of the woman-and-dog teams
this was not easy. March owned that the notion of
their being yokemates was shocking ; but he urged that
it was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon
the time when women dragged the carts without the
help of the dogs; and that the time might not be far
distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the
help of the women.

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but
inwardly he was troubled by his friend's apparent ac-
ceptance of unjust things on their picturesque side.
Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink
of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the
grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching
from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the
river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of
women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles,
bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and
cut them with their hooked blades. " Ah, delightful !"
March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant
sight

"But don't you think, Mr. March," the boy vent-
ured, " that the man had better be cutting the wheat,
and letting the women watch the cows ?"

" Well, I don't know. There are more of them ; and

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he wouldnH be half so graceful as they are, with that
flow of their garments, and the sway of their aching
backs." The boy smiled sadly, and March put his
hand on his shoulder as they walked on. " You find
a lot of things in Europe that need putting right, don't
you. Rose?"

"Yes; I know ifs silly."

"Well, I'm not sure. But I'm afraid it's useless.
You see, these old customs go such a way back, and
are so grounded in conditions. We think they might
be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how
cruel and ugly they are; but probably they couldn't.
I'm afraid that the Emperor of Austria himself
couldn't change them, in his sovereign plenitude of
power. The Emperor is only an old custom, too, and
he's as much grounded in the conditions as any."
This was the serious way Rose felt that March ought
always to talk; and he was too much grieved to laugh
when he went on. " The women have so much of the
hard work to do, over here, because the emperors need
the men for their armies. They couldn't let their men
cut wheat unless it was for their officers' horses, in the
field of some peasant whom it would ruin."

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to
work these paradoxes for the boy's confusion. She
said the child adored him, and it was a sacrilege to
play with his veneration. She always interfered to
save him, but with so little logic, though so much jus-
tice, that Rose suffered a humiliation from her cham-
pionship, and was obliged from a sense of self-respect
to side with the mocker. She understood this, and
magnanimously urged it as another reason why her
husband should not trifle with Rose's ideal of him ; to
make his mother laugh at him was wicked.

" Oh, I'm not his only ideal," March protested.

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'^He adores Kenby, too, and every now and then he
brings me to book with a text from Kenby's gospel."

Mrs. March caught her breath. " Kenby ! Do you
really think, then, that she — "

^^Oh, hold on now! It isnH a question o£ Mrs.
Adding; and I don't say Rose has an eye on poor old
Kenby as a step-father. I merely want you to imder-
stand that I'm the object of a divided worship, and
that when I'm off duty as an ideal I don't see why I
shouldn't have the fun of making Mrs. Adding laugh.
You can't pretend she isn't wrapped up in the boy.
You've said that yourself."

" Yes, she's wrapped up in him ; she'd give her life
for him; but she is so light. I didn't suppose she
was so light; but it's borne in upon me more and
more."

They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother,
in the sort of abeyance the Triscoes had fallen into.
One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs. March's room
to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers' clubs
from the neighboring towns. The spectacle prospered
through its first half-hour, with the charm which Ger-
man sentiment and ingenuity are able to lend even a
bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed
by on machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and
decked with streaming banners. Here and there one
sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a bower of
leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club
costumes and insignia. In the height of the display a
sudden mountain shower gathered and broke upon them.
They braved it till it became a drenching downpour;
then they leaped from their machines and fled to any
shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways.
The men used their greater agility to get the best
places, and kept them; the women made no appeal for

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them by word or look, but took the rain in the open
as if they expected nothing else.

Bose watched the scene with a silent intensity which
March interpreted. " There's your chance, Rose. Why
don't you go down and rebuke those fellows ?"

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and
Mrs. March promptly attacked her husband in his be-
half. " Why don't you go and rebuke them yourself ?"

" Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation
in my phrase-book Between an indignant American
Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who have
taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the
Wheelwomen out in the Wet." Mrs. Adding shrieked
her delight, and he was flattered into going on. " For
another thing, I think it's very well for you ladies to
realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled
children of our civilization you are. It ought to make
you grateful for your privileges."

" There is something in that," Mrs. Adding joyfully
consented.

" Oh, there is no civilization but ours," said Mrs.
March, in a burst of vindictive patriotism. " I am
more and more convinced of it the longer I stay in
Europe."

"Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in
Europe ; it strengthens us in the conviction that Amer-
ica is the only civilized country in the world," said
March.

The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered,
and the band which it had silenced for a moment
burst forth again in the music which fills the Carlsbad
day from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began to play
a pot-pourri of American airs ; at the end some unseen
Americans imder the trees below clapped and cheered.

" That was opportune of the band," said March.

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" It must have been a telepathic impulse from our
patriotism in the director. But a pot-pourri of Amer-
ican airs is like that tablet dedicating the American
Park up here on the Schlossberg, which is signed by
six Jews and one Irishman. The only thing in this
medley that^s the least characteristic or original is
^ Dixie ' ; and I'm glad the South has brought us back
into the Union."

" You don't know one note from another, my dear,"
said his wife.

" I know the ' Washington Post.' "

" And don't you call that American ?"

" Yes, if Sousa is an American name ; I should have
thought it was Portuguese."

" Now that sounds a little too much like General
Triscoe's pessimism," said Mrs. March; and she add-
ed: "But whether we have any national melodies or
not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep
them soaking 1"

" No, we certainly don't," he assented, with such a
well -studied effect of yielding to superior logic that
Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, " I
hope Rose isn't acting on my suggestion ?"

" I hate to have you tease him, dearest," his wife
interposed.

" Oh no," the mother said, laughing still, but with
a note of tenderness in her laugh, which dropped at
last to a sigh. " He's too much afraid of lese-majesty
for that. But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight.
He's queer."

" He's beautiful 1" said Mrs. March.

" He's good," the mother admitted. " As good as the
day's long. He's never given me a moment's trouble —
but he troubles me. If you can imderstand 1"

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" Oh, I do understand !" Mrs. March returned. " By
his innocence, you mean. That is the worst of chil-
dren. Their innocence breaks our hearts and makes
us feel ourselves such dreadful old things."

" His innocence, yes," pursued Mrs. Adding, " and
his ideals." She began to laugh again. " He may
have gone off for a season of meditation and prayer
over the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is
turning that way a good deal lately. It's only fair to
tell you, Mr. March, that he seems to be giving up his
notion of being an editor. You mustn't be disap-
pointed."

" I shall be sorry," said the editor. " But now that
you mention it, I think I have noticed that Rose seems
rather more indifferent to periodical literature. I sup-
posed he might simply have exhausted his questions —
or my answers."

" No ; it goes deeper than that. I think it's Europe
that^s turned his impressionable mind in the direction
of reform. At any rate, he thinks now he will be a
reformer."

"Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I
hope?"

" No. His reform has a religious basis, but its ob-
jects are social. I don't make it out exactly; but I
shall, as soon as Rose does. He tells me everything,
and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually or
even intellectually."

"J9on7 laugh at him, Mrs. Adding 1" Mrs. March
entreated.

" Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing," said the
mother, gayly. Rose came shyly back into the room,
and she said, " Well, did you rebuke those bad bicy-
clers?" and she laughed again.

" They're only a custom, too. Rose," said March,

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tenderly. "Like the man resting while the women
worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it.^*

" Oh yes, I know," the boy returned.

" They ride modern machines, but they live in the
tenth century. That^s what we^re always forgetting
when we come to Europe and see these barbarians en-
joying all our up-to-date improvements."

" There, doesn't that console you ?" asked his mother,
and she took him away with her, laughing back from
the door. " I don't believe it does a bit 1"

"I don't believe she understands the child," said
Mrs. March. " She is very light, don't you think ? I
don't know, after all, whether it wouldn't be a good
thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easy-going,
and she will be sure to marry somebody."

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and
he said, " You might put these ideas to her."

With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange
faces which had familiarized themselves at the springs
disappeared ; even some of those which had become the
faces of acquaintance began to go. In the diminishing
crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen ;
the sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed
never to have quite got his bearings after his error with
General Triscoe, seldom showed itself. The Triscoes
themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fan-
cied so ; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their
daily encounter.

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-
August, but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting
up over the hills that as people went to their break-
fasts at the caf^s up the valley of the Tepl they found
him looking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in
the morning. The yellow leaves were thicker about

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the feet of the trees, and the grass was silvery gray
with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer
than they had been, and there were more little bare-
footed boys and girls with cups of red raspberries
which they offered to the passers with cries of " Him-
beerenl Himbeeren!" plaintive as the notes of birds
left songless by the receding summer.

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and
Mrs. Adding bought recklessly of it, and ate it under
his eyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over it
pots of clotted cream that the schone Lili brought them.
Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother
betrayed was a sacrifice in behalf of March's inability.

Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that
the Marches now tried to pay her when she brought
their breakfast, but they sometimes forgot, and then
they caught her whenever she came near them. In this
event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she
would lean against their table and say: " Oh no. You
stay a little. It is so nice.^^ One day after such an en-
treaty she said, " The queen is here this morning."

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. " The
queen !"

"Yes; the young lady. Mr. Bumamy was saying
she was a queen. She is there with her father." She
nodded in the direction of a distant corner, and the
Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the
general. " She is not seeming so gavly as she was be-
ing."

March smiled. " We are none of us so gayly as we
were being, Lili. The summer is going."

"But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?"
the girl asked, resting her tray on the comer of the
table.

" No, I^m afraid he won^t," March returned, sadly.

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" He was very good. He was paying the proprietor
for the dishes that Augusta did break when she was
falling down. He was paying before he went away,
when he was knowing that the proprietor would make
Augusta to pay.'*

" Ah !" said March ; and his wife said, " That was
like him!" and she eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding
how good and great Burnamy had been in this char-
acteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to
add some pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and
gratitude. "/ think Miss Triscoe ought to know it.
There goes the wretch now!" she broke off. "Don't
look at himl" She set her husband the example of
averting his face from the sight of StoUer sullenly
pacing up the middle aisle of the grove, and looking
to the right and left for a vacant table. "TJghl I
hope he won't be able to find a single place."

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while
Rose watched March's face with grave sympathy. " He
certainly doesn't deserve one. Don't let us keep you
from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can."
They got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, um-
brella, and handkerchief which the ladies let drop from
their laps.

" Have you been telling ?" March asked his wife.

" Have I told you anything ?" she demanded of Mrs.
Adding, in turn. " Anything that you didn't as good
as know already ?"

" Not a syllable I" Mrs. Adding replied, in high de-
light. "Come, Rose!"

"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything,"
said March, after she left them.

" She had guessed everything without my telling
her," said his wife.

"About StoUer?"

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" Well — no. I did tell her that part, but that was
nothing. It was about Burnamy and Agatha that she
knew. She saw it from the first ^'

" I should have thought she would have enough to
do to look after poor old Kenby.^'

" I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If
she doesn't, she oughtn't to let him write to her. Aren't
you going over to speak to the Triscoes ?"

" No, certainly not. I'm going back to the hotel.
There ought to be some steamer letters this morning.
Here we are, worrying about these strangers all the
time, and we never give a thought to our own children
on the other side of the ocean."

" / worry about them, too," said the mother, fondly.
" Though there is nothing to worry about," she added.

" It's our duty to worry," he insisted.

At the hotel the portier gave them four letters.
There was one from each of their children: one very
buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the daughter,
celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the
loveliness of Chicago as a summer city (" You would
think she was bom out there !" sighed her mother) ;
and one from the son, boasting his well-being in spite
of the heat they were having ("And just think how
cool it is here!" his mother upbraided herself), and
the prosperity of Every Other Weele. There was a
line from Fulkerson, praising the boy's editorial in-
stinct, and ironically proposing March's resignation in
his favor.

" I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well
as not," said Mrs. March, proudly. " What does Bur-
namy say ?"

" How do you know it's from him ?"

"Because you've been keeping your hand on it

Give it here."

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'' When Fve read it."

The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and
dealt, except for some messages of affection to Mrs.
March, with a scheme for a paper which Bumamy
wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought
he conld use it in Every Other Week. He had come
upon a book about that hapless foundling in Nurem-
berg, and after looking up all his traces there he had
gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his
death so pathetically. Bumamy said he could not
give any notion of the enchantment of Nuremberg;
but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol
for his after - cure, not to fail staying a day or so in
the wonderful place. He thought March would enjoy
Ansbach, too, in its way.

" And not a word — not a syllable — about Miss Tris-
coe !" cried Mrs. March. " Shall you take his paper ?"

" It would be serving him right, if I refused it,
wouldn^titr

They never knew what it cost Bumamy to keep her
name out of his letter, or by what an effort of tho
will he forbade himself even to tell of his parting
interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his
remorse for letting Stoller give himself away; he was
still sorry for that, but he no longer suffered; yet he
had not reached the psychological moment when he
could celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was
glad he had been able to hold out against the tempta-
tion to retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was
himibly glad, and he felt that until happier chance
brought him and his friends together he must leave
them to their merciful conjectures. He was young,
and he took the chance, with an aching heart. If he
had been older, he might not have taken it.

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The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently,
in late August, in the good weather which is pretty
sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian summer.
For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been
building a scaffolding for the illimiination in the woods
on a height overlooking the town, and making unob-
trusive preparations at points within it.

The day was important as the last of Marches cure,
and its pleasures began for him by a renewal of his
acquaintance in its first kindliness with the Eltwins.
He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought
they must have gone away, but now after his first cup
he saw the quiet, sad old pair, sitting together on a
bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked leave to sit
down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin
said that this was their last day, too; and explained
that his wife always came with him to the springs,
while he took the waters.

"Well," he apologized, "we're all that's left, and
I suppose we like to keep together." He paused, and
at the look in March's face he suddenly went on : "I
haven't been well for three or four years ; but I always
fought against coming out here when the doctors want-
ed me to. I said I couldn't leave home; and I don't
suppose I ever should. But my home left mc."

As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and
March saw her steal her withered hand into his.

" We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off,

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with one thing or another, and here in the spring we
lost our last daughter. Seemed perfectly well, and all
at once she died ; heart-failure, they called it. It broke
me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so
we're here." His voice trembled; and his eyes soft-
ened ; then they flashed up, and March heard him add,
in a tone that astonished him less when he looked roimd
and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, " I
don't know what it is always makes me want to kick
that man."

The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped
that Mrs. Eltwin was well, and Major Eltwin better.
He did not notice their replies, but said to March,
" The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's reading-
room, to go with them to the Posthof for breakfast"

" Aren't you going, too ?" asked March.

"No, thank you," said the general, as if it were
much finer not; "I shall breakfast at our pension.^^
He strolled off with the air of a man who has done
more than his duty.

" I don't suppose I ought to feel that way," said
Eltwin, with a remorse which March suspected a re-
proachful pressure of his wife's hand had prompted in
him. " I reckon he means well."

" Well, I don't know," March said, with a candor he
could not wholly excuse.

On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife
for her interest in the romantic woes of her lovers, in
a world where there was such real pathos as these poor
old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe ho
could not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse
her on the way from Pupp's, with the doubt he always
felt in passing the Cafe Sans-Souci, whether he should
live to reach the Posthof where he meant to breakfast.
She said, "Poor Mr. March I" and laughed inatten-

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lively; when he went on to philosophize the commonr
ness of the sparse company always observable at the
Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation
between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed ab-
sently, and his wife frowned at him.

The flower -woman at the gate of her garden had
now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which
flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left
steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fra-
grance ; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes
trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley,
its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage
as it moved.

At the Posthof the schone Lili alone was as gay as
in the prime of July. She played archly about the
guests she welcomed to a table in a sunny spot in the
gallery. " You are tired of Carlsbad ?" she said, caress-
ingly, to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before
her.

" Not of the Posthof," said the girl, listlessly.

" Posthof, and very little Lili ?" She showed, with
one forefinger on another, how very little she was.

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to
Mrs. March, with abrupt seriousness, " Augusta was
finding a handkerchief under the table, and she was
washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I
have scolded her, and I have made her give it to
me."

She took from under her apron a man's handker-
chief, which she offered to Mrs. March. It bore, as
she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B. But,
" Whose can it be ?" they asked each other.

"Why, Bumamy's," said March, and Lili's eyes
danced. " Give it here!"

His wife caught it farther away. " No, I'm going

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to see whose it is first; if it's his, I'll send it to him
myself."

She tried to put it into the pocket which was not
in her dress by sliding it do\^Ti her lap ; then she hand-
ed it to the girl, who took it with a careless air, but
kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber san-
dals, but for once in Carlsbad the weather was too dry
for them, and she had taken them off and was holding
them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she
now rose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them
up. Miss Triscoe was too quick for her.

*' Oh, let me carry them for you 1" she entreated,
and after a tender struggle she succeeded in enslaving
herself to them, and went away wearing them through
the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was
not the kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and
Mrs. March was not the kind of woman to suffer them ;
but they played the comedy through, and let March
go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet
him in the Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus
for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final
shopping, and invited the girPs advice with a fond-
ness which did not prevent her rejecting it in every
case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval. In the Stadt
Park they sat down and talked ; from time to time Mrs.
March made polite feints of recovering her sandals, but
the girl kept them with increased effusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench
where they had been sitting, they seemed to be fol-
lowed. They looked round and saw no one more alarm-
ing than a very severe - looking old gentleman, whose
hat brim in spite of his severity was limp with much
lifting, as all Austrian hat brims are. He touched it,

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

and saying, haughtily, in German, " Something left ly-
ing," passed on.

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they
glanced down at their skirts to see if there was any-
thing amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe perceived her
hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Buma-
my's handkerchief.

" Oh, I pnt it in one of the toes !'' she lamented,
and she fled back to their bench, alarming in her course
the fears of a gendarme for the public security, and
putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts of
its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry.
She laughed breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March.
" That comes of having no pocket ; I didn't suppose I
could forget your sandals, Mrs. March 1 Wasn't it ab-
surdV

" It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her
husband afterward, " that they can always laugh over
together."

^^They? And what about Bumamy's behavior to
Stoller?"

" Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come
right. Of course, he can make it up to him somehow.
And I regard his refusal to do wrong when Stoller
wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence."

" Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind
you. My only hope is that when we leave here to-
morrow, her pessimistic papa's poison will neutralize
yours somehow."

One of the pleasantest incidents of March's sojourn
in Carlsbad was his introduction to the manager of the
municipal theatre by a common friend who explained
the editor in such terms to the manager that he con-
ceived of him as a brother artist. This led to much
bowing and smiling from the manager when the

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Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent
visits to the theatre^ with which March felt that it
might well have ended, and still been far beyond his
desert. He had not thought of going to the opera
on the Emperor^s birthnight, but after dinner a box
came from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with
him that they could not in decency accept so great a
favor. At the same time, she argued that they could
not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense
of the pleasure done them they must adorn their box
with all the beauty and distinction possible; in other
words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe and her
father.

"And why not Major Eltwin and his wife? Or
Mrs. Adding and Rose ?"

She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to
be foolish; and they went early, so as to be in their
box when their guests came. The foyer of the theatre
was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of ever-
greens stool a high - pedestalled bust of the paternal
Csesar, with whose side-whiskers a laurel crown com-
ported itself as well as it could. At the foot of tho
grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood
in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felici-
tations upon the honor which the theatre was sure to do
itself on an occasion so august. The Marches were so
cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded
to an artist's impulse and begged his fellow-artist to
do him the pleasure of coming behind the scenes be-
tween the acts of the opera; he bowed a heart-felt re-
gret to 'Mrs. March that he could not make the in-
vitation include her, and hoped that she would not be
too lonely while her husband was gone.

She explained that they had asked friends, and she
should not be alone, and then he entreated March to

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bring any gentleman who was his guest with him. On
the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she
used in their young married days, and asked him if it
was not perfect. " I wish we were going to have it all
to ourselves ; no one else can appreciate the whole situa-
tion. Do you think we have made a mistake in having
the Triscoes ?"

" Wer he retorted. " Oh, that's good! Tm going
to shirk him, when it comes to going behind the scenes."

" No, no, dearest/' she entreated. " Shabbing will
only make it worse. We must stand it to the bitter end
now.''

The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the
Emperor, with a chorus of men formed on either side,
who broke into the grave and noble strains of the
Austrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then the cur-
tain fell again, and in the interval before the opera
could begin General Triscoe and his daughter came in.

Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl
appeared as a tribute to her hospitality. She had
hitherto been a little disappointed of the open homage
to American girlhood which her reading of interna-
tional romance had taught her to expect in Europe,
but now her patriotic vanity feasted full. Eat high-
hotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss
Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances
which fell blunted from her complexion and costume;
the house was brilliant with the military uniforms
which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled
millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers
dwelt on the perfect mould of her girlish arms and
neck and the winning lines of her face. The girl's
eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little
head, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slow-
ly turned it from side to side, after she removed the

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airy scarf which had covered it. Her father, in even-
ing dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a
civil occasion, and took a chair in the front of the
box without resistance; and the ladies disputed which
should yield the best place to the other, till Miss Tris-
coe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act
at least

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people
time for the illuminations afterward; but as it was it
gave scope to the actress who, ah Gast from a Vien-
nese theatre, was the chief figure in it. She merited
the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply
embedded in her massive bulk, but never wholly ob-
scured.

" That is grand, isn't it ?" said March, following
one of the tremendous strokes by which she overcame
her physical disadvantages. " It's fine to see how her
art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all
those steins of beer, those illimitable links of sausage,
those boundless fields of cabbage. But it's rather pa-
thetic."

" It's disgusting," said his wife ; and at this (Gen-
eral Triscoe, who had been watching the actress through
his lorgnette, said, as if his contrary-mindedness wero
irresistibly invoked :

" Well, I don't know. It's amusing. Do you sup-
pose we shall see her when we go behind, March ?"

He still professed a desire to do so when the cur-
tain fell, and they hurried to the rear door of the
theatre. It was slightly ajar, and they pulled it wide
open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and
began to mount the stairs leading up from it between
rows of painted dancing - girls, who had come out for
a breath of air, and who pressed themselves against
the walls to make room for the intruders. With their

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rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensi-
fied by the coloring of their brows and lashes, they were
like painted statues, as they stood there with their
crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.

" This is rather weird,'' said March, faltering at the
sight. " I wonder if we might ask these young ladies
where to go ?" General Triscoe made no answer, and
was apparently no more prepared than himself to ac-
cost the files of danseuses, when they were themselves
accosted by an angry voice from the head of the stairs
with a demand for their business. The voice belonged
to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed
as deeply scandalized at their appearance as they could
have been at that of the young ladies.

March explained, in his ineflFective German, with
every effort of improbability, that they were there by
appointment of the manager, and wished to find his
room.

The gendarme would not or could not make any-
thing out of it. He pressed down upon them, and,
laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to
force them back to the door. The mild nature of the
editor might have yielded to his violence, but the martial
spirit of General Triscoe was roused. He shrugged the
gendarme's hand from his shoulder, and with a voice
as furious as his own required him, in English, to say
what the devil he meant. The gendarme rejoined with
equal heat in German ; the general's tone rose in anger ;
the dancing-girls emitted some little shrieks of alarm,
and fled noisily up the stairs. From time to time
March interposed with a word of the German which
had mostly deserted him in his hour of need; but, if
it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, it would
have had no effect upon the disputants. They grew
more outrageous, till the manager himself appeared at

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the head of the stairs and extended an arresting hand
over the hubbub. As soon as the situation clarified it-
self, he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar
of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and
led them up to his room and forced them into arm-
chairs with a rapidity of reparation which did not
exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every cir-
cumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortify-
ing to him. But with all his haste he lost so much time
in this that he had little left to show them through the
theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna was
reduced to the obeisances with which they met and
parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the
curtain. In the lack of a common language this was
perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing
could have been more honorable than their dismissal
at the hands of the gendarme who had received them so
stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood with
his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a
whole file of grenadiers.

At the same moment Bumamy bowed himself out
of the box where he had been sitting with the ladies
during the absence of the gentlemen. He had knock-
ed at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and,
if he did not fully share the consternation which his
presence caused, he looked so frightened that Mrs.
March reserved the censure which the sight of him in-
spired, and in default of other inspiration treated his
coming simply as a surprise. She shook hands with
him, and then she asked him to sit down, and listened
to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad
to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from
the Paris-New York Chronicle; that he had seen them
in the box and had ventured to look in. He was pale,
and so discomposed that the heart of justice was soft-

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ened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she
left him to the talk that sprang tip, by an admirable
effect of tact in the young lady, between him and Miss
Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal
in his being in Carlsbad, and possibly in the last anal-
ysis there was nothing so very wicked in his being
in her box. One might say that it was not very nice
of him after he had gone away under such a cloud;
but, on the other hand, it was nice, though in a diffel^
ent way, if he longed so much to see Miss Triscoe that
he could not help coming. It was altogether in his
favor that he was so agitated, though he was moment-
ly becoming less agitated; the yoimg people were
beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and
General Triscoe going behind the scenes. Bumamy
said he envied them the chance; and added, not very
relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth, where he
had seen the last of the Wagner performances. He said
he was going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again,
where he had finished looking up that Kaspar Hauser
business. He seemed to think Mrs. March would know
about it, and she could not help saying, " Oh yes,
Mr. March was so much interested." She wondered
if she ought to tell him about his handkerchief; but
she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss
Triscoe's keeping. She wondered if the girl realized
how handsome he was. He was extrenuely handsome,
in his black evening dress, with his Tuxedo, and the
pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt front.

At the bell for the rising of the curtain, he rose, too,
and took their offered hands. In offering hers, Mrs.
March asked if he would not stay and speak with Mr.
March and the general; and now for the first time he
recognized anything clandestine in his visit. He laugh-

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ed nervously, and said, ^' No, thank vouP^ and shut
himself out.

" We must tell them V^ said Mrs. March, rather in-
terrogatively, and she was glad that the girl answered
with a note of indignation.

" Why, certainly, Mrs. March."

They could not tell them at once, for the second
act had begun when March and the general came back ;
and after the opera was over and they got out into the
crowded street there was no chance, for the general
was obliged to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her
husband followed with his daughter.

The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were
outlined with thickly set little lamps, which beaded
the arches of the bridges spanning the Tepl and light-
ed the casements and portals of the shops. High above
all, against the curtain of black woodland on the moun-
tain where its skeleton had been growing for days, glit-
tered the colossal effigy of the double-headed eagle of
Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman
Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps
the pale Christ looked down from the mountain opposite
upon the surging multitudes in the streets and on the
bridges.

They were most amiable multitudes, March thought,
and they responded docilely to the entreaties of the
policemen who stood on the steps of the bridges and
divided their encountering currents with patient ap-
peals of " Bitte schon ! Bitte schon !" He laughed to
think of a New York cop saying, " Please prettily 1
Please prettily !" to a New York crowd which he wish-
ed to have go this way or that, and then he burned with
shame to think how far our manners were from civiliza-
tion, wherever our heads and hearts might be, when he

heard a voice at his elbow : *

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" A punch with a club would start some of these fel-
lows along quicker/*

It was StoUer, and March turned from him to lose
his disgust in the sudden terror of perceiving that Miss
Triscoe was no longer at his side. Neither could he
see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to push
frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl. He
had an interminable five or ten minutes in his vain
search, and he was going to call out to her by name
when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless absurdity
by elbowing his way to him with Miss Triscoe on his
arm.

" Here she is, Mr. March," he said, as if there were
nothing strange in his having been there to find her;
in fact, he had followed them all from the theatre, and
at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss
Triscoe carried off helpless in the himian stream, had
plunged in and rescued her. Before March could for-
mulate any question in his bewilderment, Burnamy
was gone again; the girl offered no explanation for
him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when
he caught sight of his wife and General Triscoe stand-
ing tiptoe in a doorway and craning their necks up-
ward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him
and his charge. Then he looked round at her and
opened his lips to express the astonishment that filled
him, when he was aware of an ominous shining of her
eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.

She pressed his arms nervously, and he imderstood
her to beg him to forbear at once all question of her
and all comment on Bumamy's presence to her father.

It would not have been just the time for either.
Not only Mrs. March was with the general, but Mrs.
Adding also; she had called to them from that place,
where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddy-

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ing about in the crowd. The general was still express-
ing a gratitude which became more pressing the more
it was disclaimed; he said, casually, at sight of his
daughter, " Ah, you've found us, have you ?" and went
on talking to Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laugh-
ingly and asked, " Did you see me beckoning ?"

"Look here, my dear!" March said to his wife as
soon as they parted from the rest, the general gal-
lantly promising that his daughter and he would see
Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their
way slowly home alone. "Did you know that Bur-
namy was in Carlsbad ?"

" He's going away on the twelve - o'clock train to-
night," she answered, firmly.

" What has that got to do with it ? Where did you
see him ?"

" In the box, while you were behind the scenes."

She told him all about it, and he listened in silent
endeavor for the ground of censure from which a sense
of his own guilt forced him. She asked, suddenly,
" Where did you see him ?" and he told her in turn.

He added, severely, " Her father ought to know.
Why didn't you tell him ?"

" Why didn't you f " she retorted, with great reason.

"Because I didn't think he was just in the humor
for it." He began to laugh as he sketched their en-
counter with the gendarme, but she did not seem to
think it amusing; and he became serious again. "Be-
sides, I was afraid she was going to blubber, anyway."

" She wouldn't have blubbered, as you call it. I
don't know why you need be so disgusting! It would
have given her just the moral support she needed.
Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will
blame us. You ought to have spoken ; you could have
done it easily and naturally when you came up with

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her. You will have yourself to thank for all the trouble
that comes of it now, my dear/'

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting
the blame on him. " All right ! I should have had to
stand it, even if you hadnH behaved with angelic wis-
dom."

" Why," she said, after reflection, " I don't see what
either of us has done. We didn't get Bumamy to come
here, or connive at his presence in any way."

" Oh ! Make Triscoe believe that ! He knows youVe
done all you could to help the affair on."

"Well, what if I have? He began making up to
Mrs. Adding himself as soon as he saw her to-night
She looked very pretty."

"Well, thank Heaven! we're off to-morrow morn-
ing, and I hope we've seen the last of them. They've
done what they could to spoil my cure, but I'm not
going to have them spoil my after-cure."

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof
for breakfast, where they had already taken a lavish
leave of the schone Lili, with a sense of being promptly
superseded in her affections. They found a place in
the red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and
were sei^ved by the pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth
whom they had known only as Ein-und-Zwanzig, and
whose promise of " Konmi' gleich, bitte schon !" was
like a bird's note. Never had the coffee been so good,
the bread so aerially light, the Westphalian ham so ten-
derly pink. A young married couple whom they knew
came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat
down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.

" If you had told them we were going, dear," said
Mrs. March, when the couple were themselves gone,
" we should have been as old as ever. Don't let us tell

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anybody, this morning, that we^re going. I couldn't
bear it/'

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the
hotel into their confidence, in the process of paying
their bill. He put on his high hat and came out to
see them off. The portier was already there, standing
at the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had
ordered for the long drive to the station. The Swiss
elevator-man came to the door to offer them a fellow-
republican's good wishes for their journey ; Herr Pupp
himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their
return another summer. Mrs. March bent a last look
of interest upon the proprietor as their two -spanner
whirled away.

" They say that he is going to be made a count."

" Well, I don't object," said March. " A man who
can feed fourteen thousand people, mostly Germans, in
a day ought to be made an archduke."

At the station something happened which touched
them even more than these last attentions of the hotel.
They were in their compartment, and were in the act
of possessing themselves of the best places by putting
their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs.
March's name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his
thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glow-
ing. " I was afraid I shouldn't get here in time,"
he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of
flowers.

" Why Rose ! From your mother ?"

"From me," he said, timidly, and he was slipping
out into the corridor, when she caught him and his
flowers to her in one embrace. ^^ I want to kiss you,"
she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand
to them from the platform outside, and the train had

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started, she fumbled for her handkerchief. "I sup-
pose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest
child !'^

"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compa-
triots that I'm sorry to leave behind,'' March assented.
" He's the only unmarried one that wasn't in danger
of turning up a lover on my hands ; if there had been
some rather old girl, or some rather light matron in
our acquaintance, I'm not sure that I should have been
safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been an interrup-
tion to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I
hope now that it will begin again."

" Yes," said his wife, " now we can have each other
all to ourselves."

" Yes. It's been very different from our first wed-
ding journey in that. It isn't that we're not so young
now as we were, but that we don't seem so much our
own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and
now we seem to be mere tenants at will, and any iu-
terloping lover may come in and set our dearest inter-
ests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of living along
is that we get too much into the hands of other people."

" Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all,
too."

" I don't know that the drawback is serious enough
to make us wish we had died young — or younger," he
suggested.

" No, I don't know that it is," she assented. She
added, from an absence where he was sufficiently able
to locate her meaning, " I hope she'll write and tell
me what her father says and does when she tells him
that he was there."

There were many things, in the weather, tlie land-
scape, thoir sole occupancy of an unsmoking compart-
ment, while all the smoking compartments round over-

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flowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a
pleasing illusion of the past; it was sometimes so per-
fect that they almost held each other's hands. In later
life there are such moments when the youthful emotions
come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the elder-
ly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young.
But it is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs.
^[arch joined her husband in mocking it, when he made
her observe how fit it was that their silver wedding
journey should be resumed as part of his after - cure.
If he had found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat,
faintly nauseous Avater of the Felsenquelle, he was not
going to call himself twenty-eight again till his second
month of the Carlsbad regimen was out and he had got
back to salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much
leisure for it that they could form a life-long friend-
ship for the old English-speaking waiter who served
them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.
The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along
through a cheerful country, with tracts of forest under
white clouds blowing about in a blue sky, and gayly
flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed
land, and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were
cutting the leisurely harvest with sickles, and where
once a great girl with swarthy bare arms unbent her-
self from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and
beauty, to watch them go by. Hedges of evergreen en-
closed the yellow oat-fields, where slow wagons paused
to gather the sheaves of the week before, and then
loitered away with them. Flocks of geese waddled in
sculpturesque relief against the close-cropped pastures,
herded by little girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes,
blue as corn-flowers, followed the flying train. There
were stretches of wild thyme purpling long -barren

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acreages, and growing tip the railroad banks almost to
the rails themselves. From the meadows the rowen,
tossed in long, loose windrows, sent into their car a sad
autumnal fragrance which mingled with the tobacco
smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow
corridor outside their compartments and tried to pass
each other. Their vast stomachs beat together in a vain
encounter.

" Zu enge !" said one, and " Ja, zu enge !" said the
other, and they laughed innocently in each other's faces,
with a joy in their recognition of the corridor's narrow-
ness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finest wit

All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew
near Nuremberg it grew enchanting, with a fairy
quaintness. The scenery was Alpine, but the scale
was toylike, as befitted the region, and the mimic
peaks and valleys with green brooks gushing between
them, and strange rock forms recurring in endless
caprice seemed the home of children's story. All the
gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful
fellowship with the peasants who ploughed the little
fields, and gathered the garlanded hops, and lived in
the farmsteads and village houses with those high, tim-
ber-laced gables.

"We ought to have come here long ago with the
children, when they were children," said March.

" No," his wife returned ; " it would have been too
much for them. Nobody but grown people could bear
it."

The spell which began here was not really broken
by anything that afterward happened in Nuremberg,
though the old toy-capital was trolley-wired through
all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel
lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equip-
ped with an elevator which was so modem that it

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came down with them as well as went up. All the
things that assumed to be of recent structure or in-
vention were as nothing against the dense past, which
overwhelmed them with the sense of a world elsewhere
outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the
picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact
and the commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else,
you are steeped in the Gothic spirit which expresses it-
self in a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness, of en-
dearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive
grace and beauty almost never. It is the architectural
speech of a strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people's
fancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible, and such as
it is it was bewitching for the travellers.

They could hardly wait till they had supper before
plunging into the ancient town, and they took the first
tram-car at a venture. It was a sort of transfer, drawn
by horses, which delivered them a little inside of the
city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare
demanded their destination ; March frankly owned that
they did not know where they wanted to go ; they want-
ed to go anywhere the conductor chose; and the con-
ductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at
the public garden, which, as one of the newest things
in the city, would make the most favorable impression
upon strangers. It was, in fact, so like all other city
gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys,
that it sheltered them effectually from the picturesque-
ness of Nuremberg, and they had a long, peaceful hour
on one of its benches, where they rested from their
journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appro-
priate the charm of the city.

The next morning it rained, according to a custom
which the elevator-boy (flown with the insolent recol-
lection of a sunny summer in Milan) said was invari-

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able in Nuremberg; but after the one -o'clock table
d'hote they took a noble two -spanner carriage, and
drove all round the city. Everywhere the ancient
moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and shrubs,
stretched a girdle of garden between their course and
the wall beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy cling-
ing to its crevices, or broad meshes of the shining
foliage mantling its blackened masonry. A tile-roofed
open gallery ran along the top, where so many cen-
turies of sentries had paced, and arched the massive
gates with heavily moulded piers, where so countlessly
the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth against their
besiegers, and so often the league hosts had dashed
themselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten
battles would have flooded the moat where now the
grass and flowers grew, or here and there a peaceful
stretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where
the Hapsburg Kaisers dwelt when they visited their
faithful imperial city. From its ramparts the incred-
ible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself,
and if one has any love for the distinctive quality of
Teutonic architecture it is here that more than any-
where else one may feast it. The prospect of tower
and spire and gable is of such a mediieval richness, of
such an abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost
in it. The multitudinous roofs of red -brown tiles,
blinking browsily from their low dormers, press upon
one another in endless succession ; they cluster together
on a rise of ground and sink away where the street falls,
but they nowhere disperse or scatter, and they end
abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond which
looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue
of misty uplands.

A prettv young girl waited at the door of the tower

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for the visitors to gather in sufficient number, and then
led them through the terrible museum, diseanting in
the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on
all the murderous engines and implements of torture.
First in German and then in English she explained
the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she winningly
illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which
men had been stretched and broken, and she sweetly
vaunted a sword which had beheaded eight hundred
persons. When she took the established fee from March
she suggested, with a demure glance, " And what more
you please for saying it in English."

" Can you say it in Russian ?" demanded a young
man, whose eyes he had seen dwelling on her from
the beginning. She laughed archly, and responded
with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train
of sight - seers over to the custodian who was to show
them through the halls and chambers of the Burg.
These were undergoing the repairs which the monu-
ments of the past are perpetually suffering in the pres-
ent, and there was some special painting and varnish-
ing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming to
Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand.
But if they had been in the unmolested discomfort of
their unlivable magnificence, their splendor was such
as might well reconcile the witness to the superior com-
fort of a private station in our snugger day. The
Marches came out owning that the youth which might
once have found the romantic glories of the place
enough was gone from them. But so much of it was
left to her that she wished to make him stop and look
at the flirtation which had blossomed out between that
pretty young girl and the Russian, whom they had
scarcely missed from their party in the Burg. He had

apparently never parted from the girl, and now as they

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sat together on the threshold of the gloomy tower, he
mtist have been teaching her more Slavic words, for
they were both laughing as if they understood each
other perfectly.

In his security from having the affair in any wise
on his hands, March would have willingly lingered to
see how her education got on; but it began to rain.
The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the
elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage ; and
they drove off to find the famous Little Goose Man.
This is what every one does at Nuremberg; it would
be difficult to say why. When they found the Little
Goose Man, he was only a mediccval fancy in bronze,
who stood on his pedestal in the market-place and
contributed from the bill of the goose imder his arm
a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares
of the wet market-women roimd the fountain, and
soaking their cauliflowers and lettuce, their grapes
and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the watery
flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.

The air was very raw and chill ; but after supper the
clouds cleared away, and a pleasant evening tempted
the travellers out. The portier dissembled any slight
which their eagerness for the only amusement he could
think of inspired, and directed them to a popular
theatre which was giving a summer season at low
prices to the lower classes, and which they surprised,
after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of
back square. They got the best places at a price
which ought to have been mortifyingly cheap, and
found themselves, with a thousand other harmless
bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable bam,
of a decoration by no means ugly, and of a certain
artless comfort. Each seat fronted a shelf at the back
of the seat before it, where the spectator could put

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his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the
beer passed constantly throughout the evening; and
there was a buffet where he could stay himself with
cold ham and other robust Grerman refreshments.

It was " The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg " upon
which they had oddly chanced, and they accepted as a
national tribute the character of an American girl in
it She was an American girl of the advanced pattern,
and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a
head-waiter. She seemed to have no office in the drama
except to illustrate a German conception of American
girlhood, but even in this simple function she seemed
rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps be-
cause of the occasional English words which she used.

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they
came out of the theatre it was not raining; the night
was as brilliantly starlit as a night could be in Ger-
many, and they sauntered home richly content through
the narrow streets and through the beautiful old Da-
menthor, beyond which their hotel lay. How pretty,
they said, to call that charming port the Ladies' Gate !
They promised one another to find out why, and they
never did so, but satisfied themselves by assigning it
to the exclusive use of the slim maidens and massive
matrons of the old Neuremberg patriciate, whom they
imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch
in perpetual procession.

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The life of the Ifuremberg patriciate, now extinct
in the control of the city which it builded so strenu-
ously and maintained so heroically, is still insistent in
all its art. This expresses their pride at once and their
simplicity with a childish literality. At its best, it is
never so good as the good Italian art, whose influence
is always present in its best. The coloring of the great
canvases is Venetian, but there is no such democracy of
greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration
the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst
puerile. Wherever it had obeyed an academic inten-
tion it seemed to ^farch poor and coarse, as in the
bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence.
The water spirts from the pouted breasts of the beau-
tiful figures in streams that cross and interlace after a
fancy trivial and gross ; but in the base of the church
there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting
in its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made
it even more affecting than the sculptor imagined it;
they have blurred the faces and figures in passing till
their features are scarcely distinguishable; and the
sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back
into the mother-marble. It is of the same tradition and
impulse with that supreme glory of the native sculpt-
ure, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which
climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of
richly carven story ; and no doubt if there were a Nu-

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remberg sculptor doing great things to-day his work
would be of kindred inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered
the tabernacle at rather a hard bargain from the artist
still worship on the floor below, and the descendants
of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews
about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates
on the pew - tops. The vergeress who showed the
Marches through the church was devout in the praise
of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. " So sim-
ple, and yet so noble!" she said. She was a very ro-
mantic vergeress, and she told them at unsparing length
the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist fell asleep
in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and saw
in a vision the master-work, with the lily-like droop at
top, which gained him her hand. They did not real-
ize till too late that it was all out of a novel of Georg
Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the church a
gift worthy of an inedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm
rarely imparted by the Nuremberg manner. They
missed there the constant, sweet civility of Carlsbad,
and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors
for a little cordiality. They, indeed, inspired with
some kindness the old woman who showed them through
that cemetery where Albrecht Diirer and ITans Sachs
and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under
monumental brasses of such beauty

"That kings, to have the like, might wish to die."

But this must have been because they abandoned them-
selves so willingly to the fascination of the bronze skull
on the tomb of a fourteenth-century patrician, which
had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to

the upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for

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their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless smile,
to let them discover the head of a nail artfully figured
in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and
gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had
killed him by driving a nail into his temple and had
been fitly beheaded for the murder.

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery,
but she consented to let them wonder at the richness
of the sculpture in the level tombs, with their escutch-
eons and memorial tablets overrun by the long grass
and the matted ivy; she even consented to share their
indignation at the destruction of some of the brasses
and the theft of others. She suffered more reluct-
antly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion fig-
ured in sculpture at one comer of the cemetery, where
the anguish of the Christ had long since faded into
the stone from which it had been evoked, and the
thieves were no longer distinguishable in their peni-
tence or impenitence; but she parted friends with
them when she saw how much they seemed taken
with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family,
where a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in
the frieze, like the line of dogs which chase one an-
other, with bones in their mouths, around the Canossa
palace at Verona. A sense of the beautiful house by
the Adige was part of the pleasing confusion which
possessed them in Nuremberg whenever they came upon
the expression of the Gothic spirit common both to the
German and northern Italian art. They knew that it
was an effect which had passed from Germany into
Italy, but in the liberal air of the older land it had
come to so much more beauty that now, when they
found it in its home, it seemed something fetched from
over the Alps and coarsened in the attempt to naturalize
it to an alien air.

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In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian
painters from the German pictures they had inspired ;
in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble Proces-
sional of Diirer was the more precious because his
Triumph of Maximilian somehow suggested Manteg-
na's Triumph of Caesar. There was to be a banquet
in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the
German Emperor, coming the next week, and the
Rathhaus was full of work-people furbishing it up
against his arrival, and making it difficult for the cus-
todian who had it in charge to show it properly to
strangers. She was of the same enthusiastic sister-
hood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and the guar-
dian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she
prevailed over the workmen so far as to lead her charges
out through the corridor where the literal conscience of
the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof to an exact
image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four
hundred years ago. In this relief, thronged with men
and horses, the gala-life of the past survives in unex-
ampled fulness; and March blamed himself after en-
joying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality
which seems the final effect of the German Gothicism
in sculpture.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an
earlier New England ideal of the day by ceasing from
sight-seeing. She could not have imderstood the ser-
mon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the
lingering conscience she had on this point by not go-
ing out till afternoon. Then she foimd nothing of
the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
lands. The people were resting from their week-day
labors, but they were not playing; and the old churches,
long since converted to Lutheran uses, were locked
against tourist curiosity.

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It was as it should be; it was as it would be at
home ; and yet in this ancient city, where the past waa
so much alive in the perpetual picturesqueness, the
Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were faiu
to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness
of the streets to the shade of the public garden they
had involuntarily visited the evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom
March asked some question of their way. He answered
in English, and in the parley that followed they dis-
covered that they were all Americans. The stranger
proved to be an American of the sort commonest iu
Germany, and he said he had returned to his native
country to get rid of the ague which he had taken on
Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New
York, and now a talk of Tammany and its chances in
the next election, of pulls and deals, of bosses and
heelers, grew up between the civic step - brothers and
joined them in a common interest The German-Amer-
ican said he was bookkeeper in some glass-works which
had been closed by our tariff, and he confessed that he
did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of Ger-
man affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He
said that the Socialist party was increasing faster than
any other, and that this tacitly meant the suppression
of rank and the abolition of monarchy. He warned
March against the appearance of industrial prosperity
in Germany; beggary was severely repressed, and if
poverty was better clad than with us, it was as hungry
and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. The
working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only
knifed each other quietly on Sunday evenings after
having too much beer.

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches
for good-bye ; and as he walked down the aisle of trees

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in which they had been sitting together he seemed to
be retreating farther and farther from such American-
ism as they had in common. He had reverted to an
entirely German effect of dress and figure ; his walk was
slow and Teutonic ; he must be a type of thousands who
have returned to the fatherland without wishing to own
themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with
the only country left them.

" He was rather pathetic, my dear," said March, in
tlie discomfort he knew his wife must be feeling as
well as himself. "How odd to have the lid lifted
here, and see the same old problems seething and
bubbling in the witch's caldron we call civilization as
we left simmering away at home! And how hard to
have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from
the mouths of those poor glass-workers !"

" I thought that was hard,'^ she sighed. " It must
have been his bread, too."

" Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway. I sup-
pose," he added, dreamily, " that what we used to like
in Italy was the absence of all the modem activities.
The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our
epoch in the presence of their monuments; they knew
how to behave as pensive memories. I wonder if
they're still as charming."

" Oh no," she returned ; '^ nothing is as charming
as it used to be. And now we need the charm more
than ever."

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding
they had lived into that only one of them was to be
desperate at a time, and that they were to take turns
in cheering each other up. " Well, perhaps we don't
deserve it. And I'm not sure that we need it so much
as we did when we were young. We've got tougher;
we can stand the cold facts better now. They made me

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shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable
thrill. Besides, if life kept up its pretty illusions, if
it insisted upon being as charming as it used to be, how
could we ever bear to die ? We've got that to consider/'
He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he
did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he
began, and they took the trolley back to their hotel
cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they had confronted
fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a
phrase.

They agreed that now he ought really to find out
something about the contemporary life of Nuremberg,
and the next morning he went out before breakfast
and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the
hope of intimate impressions. The peasant women,
serving portions of milk from house to house out of
the cans in the little wagons which they drew them-
selves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a
certain effect of tragedy imparted itself from the lamen-
tations of the sucking-pigs jolted over the pavements
in hand-carts ; a certain majesty from the long proces-
sion of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal
Bavarian blue, trooping by in the cold, small rain, im-
passibly dripping from their glazed hat -brims upon
their uniforms. But he could not feel that these things
were any of them very poignantly significant; and he
covered his retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg
by visiting the chief book-store and buying more photo-
graphs of the architecture than he wanted and more
local histories than he should ever read. He made a
last effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the
English-speaking clerk if there were any literary men
of distinction living in Nuremberg, and the clerk said
there was not one.

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should

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be able to make his meagre facts serve with his wife ;
but he foimd her far from any wish to listen to them.
She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table
near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that
they were proof against an interest that must other-
wise have pierced them through. The bridegroom, as
he would have called himself, was a pretty little Ba-
varian lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride
was as pretty and as little, but delicately blond. Nat-
ure had admirably mated them, and if art had helped
to bring them together through the genius of the
bride^s mother, who was breakfasting with them, it
had wrought almost as fitly. Mrs. March queried im-
partially who they were, where they met, and how, and
just when they were going to be married ; and March
consented, in his personal immimity from their romance,
to let it go on under his eyes without protest. But
later, when they met the lovers in the street, walking
arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloat-
ing upon their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her
time of life, to be ashamed of such folly. She must
know that this affair, by nine chances out of ten, could
not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tire-
some as most other marriages, and yet she was abandon-
ing herself with those ignorant young people to the
illusion that it was the finest and sweetest thing in life.

" Well, isn't it ?" his wife asked.

" Yes, that's the worst of it. It shows how poverty-
stricken life really is. We want somehow to believe
that each pair of lovers will find the good we have
missed, and be as happy as we expected to be."

" I think we have been happy enough, and that we've
had as much good as was wholesome for us," she re-
turned, hurt.

"You're always so concrete! I meant us in the

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abstract. But if you will be personal, I'll ^ay that
you've been as happy as you deserve, and got more
good than you had any right to/'

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again
to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too,
like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.

He proposed that while they were in the mood they
should go again to the old cemetery, and see the hinged
jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternal
accusation of his murderess. " It's rather hard on her,
that he should be having the last word that way," he
said. " She was a woman, no matter what mistakes she
had committed."

" That's what I call banale/' said !Mrs. March.

" It is, rather," he confessed. " It makes me feel as
if I must go to see the house of Diirer, after all."

" Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later."

It was the thing that they had said would not do,
in Nuremberg, because everybody did it ; but now they
hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Diirer's house,
which they found in a remote part of the town near a
stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by
the interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining
again by the time they reached it. The quarter had
lapsed from earlier dignity, and without being squalid,
it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could
hardly have been different in Dijrer's time. His dwell-
ing, in no way impressive outside, amid the environ-
ing quaintness, stood at the comer of a narrow side-
hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was
stripped bare of all the furniture of life belowstairs,
and above was none the cosier for the stiff appoint-
ment of a show-house. It was cavernous and cold ; but
if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid

in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare,

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after the German fashion, in the empty chambers, one
could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly ex-
istence there. It in nowise suggested the calling of
an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in
Diirer^s time to take themselves so objectively as they
do now, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen,
and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book,
and paid the visitor's fee, which also bought them
tickets in an annual lottery for a reproduction of one
of Diirer's pictures; and then they came away, by no
means dissatisfied with his house. By its association
with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other
shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse
than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's at Arqua,
or Michelangelo's at Florence. " But what I admire,"
he said, " is our futility in going to see it. We ex-
pected to surprise some quality of the man left lying
about in the house because he lived and died in it ; and
because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked
him so hard to save his widow from coming to want"

"Who said she did that?"

"A friend of his who hated her. But he had to
allow that she was a God-fearing woman, and had a
[New England conscience."

" Well, I dare say Diirer was easy-going."

" Yes ; but I don't like her laying her plans to sur-
vive him ; though women always do that."

They were going away the next day, and they sat
down that evening to a final supper in such good-
humor with themselves that they were willing to in-
clude a young couple who came to take places at their
table, though they would rather have been alone. They
lifted their eyes for their expected salutation, and
recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.'

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The ladies fell upon each other as if they had beeu
mother and daughter ; March and the young man shook
hands, in the feeling of passengers mutually endeared
by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived
at the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in Eng-
land from his partners which allowed him to prolong
his wedding journey in a tour of the Continent, while
their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter in
the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat
down to have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time*

She was one of those young wives who talk always
with their eyes submissively on their husbands, no
matter whom they are speaking to; but she was al-
ready unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No
doubt she was ruling him for his good; she had a
livelier mind than he, and she knew more, as the
American wives of young American business men al-
ways do, and she was planning wisely for their travels.
She recognized her merit in this devotion with an art-
less candor which was typical rather than personal.
March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll,
and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who
did not let them go without making her husband prom-
ise to wrap up well and not get his feet wet She made
March promise not to take him far, and to bring him
back early, which he found himself very willing to do,
after an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The
young man began to talk about his wife, in her provi-
dential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort
of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain
what sort of man he was, there was no end to it, till
they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.

The young couple came to the station to see the
Marches off after dinner the next day; and the wife
left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs. March,

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who said, as soon as they were gone, " I believe I would
rather meet people of our own age after this. I used
to think that you could keep young by being with
young people; but I don't now. Their world is very
different from ours. Our world doesn't really exist
any more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we
needn't realize it. Young people," she went on, " are
more practical - minded than we used to be; they're
quite as sentimental; but I don't think they care so
much for the higher things. They're not so much
brought up on poetry as we were," she pursued. " That
little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our
time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nurem-
berg; she was intelligent enough about the place, but
you could see that its quaintness was not so precious
as it was to us; not so sacred." Iler tone entreated
him to find more meaning in her words than she had
put into them. " They couldn't have felt as we did
about that old ivied wall and that grassy, flowery moat
under it ; and the beautiful Damenthor ; and that pile-up
of the roofs from the Burg ; and those winding streets
with their Gothic fa§ades all cobwebbed with trolley
wires; and that yellow, aguish-looking river drowsing
through the town under the windows of those over-
hanging houses ; and the market-place, and the squares
before the churches', with their queer shops in the nooks
and comers round them!"

"I see what you mean. But do you think it's as
sacred to us as it would have been twenty -five years
ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and then that
Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."

" Oh yes, so had L We're that modem, if we're not
so young as we were."

" We were very simple in those days."

" Well, if we were simple, we knew it !"
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THEIE SILVEE WEDDING JOURNEr

" Yes ; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to
pieces and looking at it/'

" We had a good time/'

" Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have
lasted longer if it had not been so good. We might
have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it."

" It would be mouldy, though.''

" I wonder," he said, recurring to the Lefferses,
" how we really struck them ?"

" Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be
travelling about alone, quite, at our age."

" Oh, not so bad as that !" After a moment he said,
" I dare say they don't go round quarrelling on their
wedding journey, as we did."

" Indeed they do ! They had an awful quarrel just
before they got to Nuremberg: about his wanting to
send some of the baggage to Liverpool by express that
she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had
been a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel
again." The elders looked at each other in the light
of experience and laughed. " Well," she ended, " that's
one thing we're through with. I suppose we've 'come to
feel more alike than we used to."

" Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about
the baggage ?"

" Oh ! He insisted on her keeping it with her."
March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone,
and after awhile she said : " Well, they gave just the
right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean
American philistinism. I don't mind their thinking
us queer; they must have thought Nuremberg was
queer."

" Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the yoimg.

We're either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're

ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be

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like US, and wouldn't for the world. The worst of it
is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we
donH, at the bottom of onr hearts, believe we're like
that when we meet. I suppose that arrogant old ass
of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.''

" I wonder," said Mrs. March, " if she's told him
yet," and March perceived that she was now suddenly
far from the mood of philosophic introspection; but
he had no difficulty in following her.

" She's had time enough. But it was an awkward
task Bumamy left to her."

" Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive
him for coming back in that way. I know she is dead
in love with him; but she could only have accepted
him conditionally."

" Conditionally to his making it all right with Stol-
ler?"

"Stoller? No! To her father's liking it."

" Ah, that's quite as hard. What makes you think
she accepted him at all ?"

" What do you think she was crying about ?"

"Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally
shed tears of pity. If she acepted him conditionally
she would have to tell her father about it." Mrs.
March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he
hastened to atone for his stupidity. "Perhaps she's
told him on the instalment plan. She may have be-
gun by confessing that Bumamy had been in Carls-
bad. Poor old fellow, I wish we were going to find
him in Ansbach ! He could make things very smooth
for us."

" Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find

him in Ansbach. I'm sure I don't know where he

is."

" You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask."

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" I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to
me/' she said, with dignity.

*^ Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all
your suffering for her. IVe asked the banker in Nu-
remberg to forward our letters to the poste restante in
Ansbach. Isn't it good to see the crows again, after
those ravens around Carlsbad V^

She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal
landscape through the open window. The afternoon
was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies of
soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting
the ground ready for the military manoeuvres; they
disturbed among the stubble foraging parties of crows,
which rose from time to time with cries of indignant
protest. She said, with a smile for the crows, " Yes.
And I'm thankful that I've got nothing on my con-
science, whatever happens," she added in dismissal of
the subject of Eurnamy.

" I'm thankful too, my dear. I'd much rather have
things on my own. I'm more used to that, and I be-
lieve I feel less remorse than when you're to blame."

They might have been carried near this point by
those telepathic influences which have as yet been so
imperfectly studied. It was only that morning, after
the lapse of a week since Bumamy's furtive reappear-
ance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father
about it, and she had at that moment a longing for
support and counsel that might well have made its
mystical appeal to Mrs. March.

She spoke at last because she could put it off no
longer, rather than because the right time had come.
She began as they sat at breakfast. " Papa, there is
something that I have got to tell you. It is some-
thing that you ought to know ; but I have put off tell-
ing you because — ^"

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She hesitated for the reason, and " Well !" said her
father, looking up at her from his second cup of coffee.
"What is it r

Then she answered, " Mr. Bumamy has been here."

" In Carlsbad ? When was he here ?"

" The night of the Emperor's birthday. He came
into the box when you were behind the scenes with
Mr. March ; afterward I met him in the crowd."

"Welir

" I thought you ought to know. Mrs. March said I
ought to tell you.''

" Did she say you ought to wait a week ?" He gave
way to an irascibility which he tried to check, and to
ask, with indifference, " Why did he come back ?"

" He was going to write about it for that paper in
Paris." The girl had the effect of gathering her cour-
age up for a bold plunge. She looked steadily at her
father and added : " He said he came back because he
couldn't help it. He — ^wished to speak with me. He
said he knew he had no right to suppose I cared any-
thing about what had happened with him and Mr. Stol-
ler. He wanted to come back and tell me — ^that."

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently
she was going to leave the word to him now. He hesi-
tated to take it, but he asked at last, with a mildness
that seemed to surprise her, " Have you heard anything
from him since ?"

" No."

"W^here is he?"

" I don't know. I told him I could not say what he
wished; that T must tell you about it."

The case was less simple than it would once have
been for General Triscoe. There was still his affec-
tion for his daughter, his wish for her happiness, but
this had always been subordinate to his sense of his

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own interest and comfort, and a question had recently
arisen which put his paternal love and duty in a new
light. He was no more explicit with himself than other
men are, and the most which could ever be said of him
without injustice was that in his dependence upon her
he would rather )iave kept his daughter to himself if
she could not Jiave been very prosperously married.
On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom she
now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready
to go to extremes concerning him.

^* lie was very anxious," she went on, " that you
should know just how it was. He thinks everything
of your judgment and — and — opinion." The general
made o consenting noise in his throat. " He said that
he did not wish me to ' whitewash ' him to you. He
didn't think he had done right; he didn't excuse him-
self, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from
the standpoint of a gentleman."

The general made a less consenting noise in his
throat and asked, " How do vou look at it yourself,
Agatha?"

" I don't believe I quite understand it j but Mrs.
March—"

^* Oh, Mrs. March !" the general snorted.

" — says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it
as Mr. Burnamy does."

" I doubt it. At any rate, I understood March quite
differently."

" She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly
afterw-ard when Mr. StoUer wanted him to help him
put a false complexion on it; that it was all the more
difficult for him to do right then, because of his re-
morse for what he had done before." As she spoke on
she had become more eager.

" There's something in that," the general admitted,

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with a candor that he made the most of both to him-
self and to her. "But I should like to know what
Stoller had to saj of it all. Is there anything/' he
inquired — " any reason why I need be more explicit
about it just now ?"

" N — no.- Only I thought — He thinks so much of
your opinion that — if — *^

" Oh, he can very well afford to wait If he values
my opinion so highly he can give me time to make up
mv mind."
"" Of course—'^

"And I'm not responsible," the general continued,
significantly, "for the delay altogether. If you had
told me this before — Now, I don't know whether
Stoller is still in town."

He was not behaving openly with her; but she had
not behaved openly with him. She owned that to
herself, and she got what comfort she could from his
making the affair a question of what Bumamy had
done to Stoller rather than of what Bumamy had said
to her, and what she had answered him. If she was
not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or
wished to have happen, there was now time and place
in which she could delay and make sure. The ac-
cepted theory of such matters is that people know
their minds from the beginning, and that they do not
change them. But experience seems to contradict this
theory, or else people often act contrary to their con-
victions and impulses. If the statistics were accessible,
it might be found that many potential engagements
hovered in a doubtful air, and before they touched the
earth in actual promise were dissipated by the play
of meteorological chances.

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in ris-
ing he said that he would step round to Pupp's and

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Bee if StoUer were still there. But on tie way He
stepped up to Mrs. Adding^s hotel on the hill, and he
came back, after an interval which he seemed not to
have found long, to report rather casually that Stoller
had left Carlsbad the day before. By this time the
fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.

He asked if the Marches had left any address with
her, and she answered that they had not They were
going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and then
push on to Holland for Mr. March's after-cure. There
was no relevance in his question unless it intimated
his belief that she was in confidential correspondence
with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying that she
was going to write her in care of their bankers; she
asked whether he wished to send any word.

" No. I understand,*' he intimated, " that there is
nothing at all in the nature of a — a — an understand-
ing, then, with — "

" No, nothing.''

" H'm !" The general waited a moment. Then he
ventured, "Do you care to say — do you wish me to
know — how he took it ?"

The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she gov-
erned herself to say, " He — ^he was disappointed."

" He had no right to be disappointed."

It was a question, and she answered : " He thought
he had. He said — ^that he wouldn't — trouble me any
more."

The general did not ask at once, " And you don't
know where he is now — ^you haven't heard anything
from him since ?"

Agatha flashed through her tears, " Papa 1"

" Oh ! I beg your pardon. I think you told me."

Digitized by VjOOQIC

XII

At the first station where the train stopped, a yonng
German bowed himself into the compartment with the
Marches^ and so visibly resisted an impulse to smoke
that March be^ed him to light his cigarette. In the
talk which this friendly overture led to between thera
he explained that he was a railway architect, employed
by the government on that line of road, -and was travel-
ling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned
the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive
medifiBvalism, and the young man said it was part
of the new imperial patriotism to cherish the Gothic
throughout Germany ; no other sort of architecture was
permitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough
classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, and he en-
tered with sympathetic intelligence into their wish to
see this former capital when March told him they were
going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the
old disjointed Germany of the petty principalities, the
little paternal despotisms now extinct

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in
English, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appeared
to the Marches more meditated than it was. In fact,
it was somewhat accidental ; Ansbach was near Nurem-
berg ; it was not much out of the way to Holland. They
took more and more credit to themselves for a reasoned
and definite motive, in the light of their companion's
enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them

with the drive from the station through streets whoso

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sentiment was both Italian and French^ and where
there was a yellowish cast in the gray of the architect-
ure which was almost Mantuan. They rested their
sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles
and points, against the smooth surfaces of the prevail-
ing classicistic facades of the houses as they passed,
and when they arrived at their hotel, an old mansion
of Versailles type, fronting on a long, irregular square
planted with pollard sycamores, they said that it might
as well have been Lucca.

The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped
with the Bavarian colors, and they were obscurely
flattered to learn that Prince Leopold, the brother of
the Prince - Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms
there, on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg,
and was momently expected with his suite. They
realized that they were not of the princely party,
however, when they were told that he had sole posses-
sion of the dining-room, and they went out to another
hotel, and had their suj^per in keeping delightfully
native. People seemed to come there to write their
letters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat
their suppers; they called for stationery like charac-
ters in old comedy, and the clatter of crockery and
the scratching of pens went on together; and fortune
offered the Marches a delicate reparation for their ex-
clusion from their own hotel in the cold popular re-
ception of the prince which they got back just in time
to witness. A very small group of people, mostly
women and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, but
there was no cheering or any sign of public interest
Perhaps he personally merited none ; he looked a dull,
sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and after
he had mounted to his apartment, the officers of his
staff stood quite across the landing and barred the

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passage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs. March's
presence, as they talked together.

" Well, my dear," said her husband, " here you have
it at last. This is what youVe been living for ever
since we came to Germany. It's a great moment"

^* Yes. What are you going to do ?"

" Who ? I ? Oh, nothing ! This is your affair ; it's
for you to act"

If she had been young, she might have withered
them with a glance; she doubted now if her dim eyes
would have any such power; but she advanced stead-
ily upon them, and then the officers seemed aware of
her and stood aside.

March always insisted that they stood aside apolo-
getically, but she held as firmly that they stood aside
impertinently, or at least indifferently, and that the in-
sult to her American womanhood was perfectly ideal.
It is true that nothing of the kind happened again
during their stay at the hotel ; the prince's officers were
afterward about in the corridors and on the stairs, but
they offered no shadow of obstruction to her going and
coming, and the landlord himself was not so preoc-
cupied with his highhotes but he had time to express
his grief that she had been obliged to go out for supper.

They satisfied the passion for the little obsolete
capital which had been growing upon them by stroll-
ing past the old Residenz at an hour so favorable for
a first impression. It loomed in the gathering dusk
even vaster than it was, and it was really vast enough
for the pride of a King of France, much more a Mar-
grave of Ansbach. Time had blackened and blotched
its coarse limestone walls to one complexion with the
statues swelling and strutting in the figure of Roman
legionaries before it, and standing out against the even-
ing sky along its balustraded roof, and had softened

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to the right tint the stretch of half a dozen houses witli
Mansard roofs and Renaissance fagades obsequiously
in keeping with the Versailles ideal of a Kesidenz. In
the rear, and elsewhere at fit distance from its courts,
a native architecture prevailed ; and at no great remove
the Marches found themselves in a simple German town
again. There they stumbled upon a little bookseller's
shop blinking in a quiet corner, and bought three or
four guides and small histories of Ansbach, which they
carried home, and studied between drowsing and wak-
ing. The wonderful German syntax seems at its most
enigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes
they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely, and
only made their way perilously out with the help
of cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives
blindly seeking their nouns, to long - procrastinated
verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance. They
emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and
better qualified than they would otherwise have been
for their second visit to the Schloss, which they paid
early the next morning.

They were so early, indeed, that when they mounted
from the great inner court, much too big for Ansbach,
if not for the building, and rung the custodian's bell,
a smiling maid who let them into an anteroom, where
she kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner,
said the custodian was busy, and could not be seen
till ten o'clock. She seemed, in her nook of the pre-
tentious pile, as innocently unconscious of its history
as any hen-sparrow who had built her nest in some
coign of its architecture; and her friendly, peaceful
domesticity remained a wholesome human background
to the tragedies and comedies of the past, and held
them in a picturesque relief in which they were alike

tolerable and even charming.

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The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil
of fable, and aboveground is a gnarled and twisted
growth of good and bad from the time of the Great
Charles to the time of the Great Frederick. Between
these times she had her various rulers, ecclesiastical
and secular, in various forms of vassalage to the em-
pire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereignty
was in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in a
constantly increasing splendor till the last sold her
outright to the King of Prussia in 1791, and went to
live in England on the proceeds. She had taken her
part in the miseries and glories of the wars that des-
olated Gtermany, but after the Reformation, when sho
turned from the ancient faith to which she owed her
cloistered origin imder St. Gumpertus, her people had
peace except when their last prince sold them to fight
the battles of others. It is in this last transaction that
her history, almost in the moment when she ceased to
have a history of her own, links to that of the modern
world, and that it came home to the Marches in their
national character ; for two thousand of those poor Ans-
bach mercenaries were bought up by England and sent
to put down a rebellion in her American colonies.

Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last
Margrave, because of certain qualities which made him
the Best Margrave, ih spite of the defects of his quali-
ties. He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally
known in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been
the Worst Margrave, but who had certainly a bad trick
of putting his subjects to death without trial, and in
cases where there was special haste, with his own hand.
He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because
he believed that the republican influences in Holland
would be wholesome for him, and then he sent him

to travel in Italy; but when the bov came home look-

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ing frail and sick the Wild Margrave charged his of-
ficial travelling companion with neglect, and had the
unhappy Hofrath Meyer hanged without process for
this crime. One of the gentlemen of his realm, for a
pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaf-
fold ; he had, at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers
shot with arrows and bullets or hanged for desertion,
besides many whose penalties his clemency commuted
to the loss of an ear or a nose ; a Hungarian who killed
his himting-dog he had broken alive on the wheel. A
soldier^s wife was hanged for complicity in a case of
desertion ; a yoimg soldier who eloped with the girl he
loved was brought to Ansbach from a neighboring town,
and hanged with her on the same gallows. A sentry
at the door of one of the Margrave^s castles amiably
complied with the Margrave's request to let him take
his gun for a moment, on the pretence of wishing to
look at it. For this breach of discipline the prince
covered him with abuse and gave him over to his hus-
sars, who bound him to a horse's tail and dragged him
through the streets; he died of his injuries. The ken-
nel-master who had charge of the Margrave's dogs was
accused of neglecting them: without further inquiry
the Margrave rode to the man's house and shot him
down on his own threshold. A shepherd who met the
Margrave on a shying horse did not get his flock out
of the way quickly enough; the Margrave demanded
the pistols of a gentleman in his company, but he an-
sAvered that they were not loaded, and the shepherd's
life was saved. As they returned home the gentleman
fired them off. "What does that mean?" cried the
Margrave, furiously. " It means, gracious lord, that
you will sleep sweeter to-night for not having heard
my pistols an hour sooner.''

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his

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moments of regret ; but perhaps it is not altogether
strange that when he died, the whole population
"stormed through the streets to meet his funeral
train, not in awe-stricken silence to meditate on the
fall of human grandeur, but to imite in an eager tu-
mult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who had
long held the city in terror were delivered over to
them bound and in chains/' For nearly thirty years
this blood-stained miscreant had reigned over his hap-
less people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which
by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still
a divine right.

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their in-
stinctive revolt from the belief that any man not un-
tamably savage could be guilty of his atrocities; and
they called his son the Last Margrave, with a touch
of the poetry which perhaps records a regret for their
extinction as a state. He did not harry them as his
father had done; his mild rule was the effect partly
of the indifference and distaste for his country bred
by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless also it was
the effect of a kindly natura Even in the matter of
selling a few thousands of them to fight the battles of
a bad cause on the other side of the world, he had
the best of motives, and faithfully applied the pro-
ceeds to the payment of the state debt and the em-
bellishment of the capital.

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the
Great, and was so constantly at war with her husband
that probably she had nothing to do with the marriage
which the Wild Margrave forced upon their son. Love
certainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Mar-
grave early escaped from it to the society of Mile.
Clairon, the great French tragedienne, whom he mot
in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make

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her home witji him in Ansbach. She lived there seven-
teen years, and though always an alien, she bore her-
self with kindness to all classes, and is still remem-
bered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a
Klarungswecke in its imperfect French.

No roll of butter records in faltering accents the
name of the brilliant and disdainful English lady who
replaced this poor tragic muse in the Margrave's heart,
though the lady herself lived to be the last Margravine
of Ansbach, where everybody seems to have hated her
with a passion which she doubtless knew how to return.
She was the daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and the
wife of Lord Craven, a sufficiently unfaithful and un-
worthy nobleman by her account, from whom she was
living apart when the Margrave asked her to his capi-
tal. There she set herself to oust Mile. Clairon with
sneers and jests for the theatrical style which the ac-
tress could not outlive. Lady Craven said she was
sure Clairon's nightcap must be a crown of gilt paper ;
and when Clairon threatened to kill herself, and the
Margrave was alarmed, ^* You forget," said Lady
Craven, "that actresses only stab themselves imder
their sleeves."

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great
tragedienne returned to Paris, where she remained
true to her false friend, and from time to time wrote
him letters full of magnanimous counsel and generous
tenderness. But she could not have been so good
company as Lady Craven, who was a very gifted per-
son, and knew how to compose songs and sing them,
and write comedies and play them, and who could
keep the Margrave amused in many ways. When his
loveless and childless wife died he married the Eng-
lish woman, but he grew more and more weary of his
dull little court and his dull little country, and after

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awhile, considering the uncertain tenure sovereigns ha*l
of their heads since the French King had lost his, and
the fact th&t he had no heirs to follow him in his
principality, he resolved to cede it for a certain sum
to Prussia. To this end his new wife's urgence was
perhaps not wanting. They went to England, where
she outlived him ten years and wrote her memoirs.

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the
Marches saw instantly that he was worth waiting for.
He was as vainglorious of the palace as any grand-
monarching margrave of them all. He could not have
been more personally superb in showing their different
effigies if they had been his own family portraits, and
he would not spare the strangers a single splendor of
the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles - like
rooms he led them through. The rooms were fatigu-
ing physically, but so poignantly interesting that Mrs.
March would not have missed, though she perished of
her pleasure, one of the things she saw. She had for
once a surfeit of highhoting in the pictures, the porce-
lains, the thrones and canopies, the tapestries, the his-
torical associations with the margraves and their mar-
riages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Na-
poleon. The Great Napoleon's man Bemadotte made
the Schloss his headquarters when he occupied Ans-
bach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his ar-
rangements for taking her bargain from Prussia and
handing it over to Bavaria, with whom it still remains.
Twice the Great Frederick had sojourned in the palace,
visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the Wild Mar-
grave, and more than once it had welcomed her next
neighbor and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of
Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercingly plain-
tive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the air.
Here, oddly enough, the spell of the Wild Margrave

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weakened in the presence of his portrait, which sig-
nally failed to justify his fame of furious tyrant.
That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular
and historical conception of him than the impression
he made upon his exalted contemporaries. The Mar-
gravine of Baireuth, at any rate, could so far excuse
her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say : " The
Margrave of Ansbach . . . was a young prince who
had been very badly educated. He continually ill-
treated my sister; they led the life of cat and dog.
My sister, it is true, was sometimes in fault. . . .
Her education had been very bad. . . . She was mar-
ried at fourteen."

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he
would easily have known them for Americans by the
handsome fee they gave him; they came away flown
with his praise; and their national vanity was again
flattered when they got out into the principal square
of Ansbach. There, in a bookseller's window, they
found among the pamphlets teaching different lan-
guages without a master, one devoted to the Amer-
ikanische Sprache as distinguished from the Englichse
Sprache. That there could be no mistake, the cover
was printed with colors in a German ideal of the star-
spangled banner; and March said he always knew
that we had a language of our own, and that now he
was going in to buy that pamphlet and find out what
it was like. He asked the young shop -woman how
it differed from English, which she spoke fairly well
from having lived eight years in Chicago. She said
that it differed from the English mainly in emphasis
and pronunciation. " For instance, the English say
' Half past,' and the Americans * Half past ' ; the Eng-
lish say laht and the Americans say Zafc."

The weather had now been clear quite long enough,

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and it was raining again, a fine, bitter, piercing drizzle.
They asked the girl if it always rained in Ansbach;
and she owned that it nearly always did. She said
that sometimes she longed for a little American sum-
mer; that it was never quite warm in Ansbach; and
when they had got out into the rain, March said : " It
was very nice to stumble on Chicago in an Ansbach
book-store. You ought to have told her you had a
married daughter in Chicago. Don't miss another
such chance."

" We shall need another bag if we keep on buying
books at this rate," said his wife with tranquil irrele-
vance ; and not to give him time for protest, she push-
ed him into a shop where the valises in the window
perhaps suggested her thought. March made haste to
forestall her there by saying they were Americans, but
the mistress of the shop seemed to have her misgivings,
and " Bom Americans, perhaps ?" she ventured. She
had probably never met any but the naturalized sort,
and supposed these were the only sort. March re-
assured her, and then she said she had a son living
in Jersey City, and she made March take his address
that he might tell him he had seen his mother; she
had apparently no conception what a great way Jersey
City is from New York.

Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came
out. " Now, that is what I never can get used to in
you, Basil, and I've tried to palliate it for twenty-
seven years. You hnow you won't look up that
poor woman's son! Why did you let her think you
would?"

" How could I tell her I wouldn't ? Perhaps I
shall."

" No, no ! You never will. I know you're good
and kind, and that's why I can't understand your be-

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ing so cruel. When we get back, how will you ever
find time to go over to Jersey City ?"

He could not tell, but at last he said : " I'll tell you
what! Y(ju must keep me up to it You know how
much you enjoy making me do my duty, and this will
be such a pleasure !"

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took
his arm*; and he began, from the example of this good
mother, to philosophize the continuous simplicity and
sanity of the people of Ansbach under all their civic
changes. Saints and soldiers, knights and barons, mar-
graves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone,
and left their single-hearted, friendly subject -folk
pretty much what they found them. The people had
suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and
apparently prospered on under all governments and
misgovernments. When the court was most French,
most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must have
remained immutably German, dull, and kind. After
all, he said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty
safe and pretty much the same.

'^ Yes, that is all very well,'' she returned, " and
you can theorize interestingly enough; but I'm afraid
that poor mother, there, had no more reality for you
than those people in the past. You appreciate her as
a type, and you don't care for her as a human being.
You're nothing but a dreamer, after all. I don't blame
you," she went on. " It's your temperament, and you
can't change now."

*^ I may change for the worse," he threatened. " I
think I have already. I don't believe I could stand
up to Dryfoos now, as I did for poor old Lindau, when
I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back in
wonder and admiration at myself. I've steadily lost
touch with life since then. I'm a trifler, a dilettante,

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and an amateur of the right and the good, as I used to
be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to be
troubled at times now, and once I never was. It never
occurred to me then that the world wasn't made to in-
terest me, or at the best to instruct me, but it does now
at times."

She always came to his defence when he accused
himself; it was the best ground he could take with
her. " I think you behaved very well with Bumamy.
You did your duty then."

"Did I? I'm not so sure. At any rate, it's the
last time I shall do it. IVe served my term. I think
I should tell him that he was all right in that busi-
ness with Stoller, if I were to meet him now."

" Isn't it strange," she said, provisionally, " that we
don't come upon a trace of him anywhere in Ansbach ?"

" Ah, you've been hoping he would turn up !"

" Yes. I don't deny it. I feel very unhappy about
him."

" I don't. He's too much like me. He would have
been quite capable of promising that poor woman to
look up her son in Jersey City. ^Vhen I think of
that, I have no patience with Bumamy."

"I am going to ask the landlord about him, now
he's got rid of his highhotes," said Mrs. March.

They went home to their hotel for their mid -day
dinner, and to the comfort of having it nearly all to
themselves. Prince Leopold had risen early, like all
the hard-working potentates of the Continent, and got
away to the manccuvres somewhere at six o'clock; the
decorations had been removed, and the court -yard
where the hired coach and pair of the prince had
rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic
ducks waddling about in it and quacking together, in-
different to the presence of a yellow mail -wagon, on

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which the driver had been apparently dozing till the
hour of noon should sound. He sat there immovable,
but at the last stroke of the clock he woke up and
drove vigorously away to the station.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of
by the prince the night before was not such as to
embitter the sense of their wrong by its splendor.
After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the
prince might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen
rather to stay at this modest hotel; but perhaps the
Schloss was reserved for more immediate royalty than
the brothers of prince - regents ; and in that case he
could not have done better than dine at the Glolden
Star. If he paid no more than two marks, he dined
as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as abundantly.
The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but
the bread, March declared, was the best bread in the
whole world, not excepting the bread of Carlsbad.

After dinner the Marches had some of the local
pastry, not so incomparable as the bread, with their
coffee, which they had served them in a pavilion of
the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the
time when it was a patrician mansion. The garden
had roses in it and several sorts of late summer flow-
ers, as well as ripe cherries, currants, grapes, and a
Virginia - creeper red with autumn, all harmoniously
contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate
where no one of the seasons can very well know itself
from the others. It had not been raining for half an
hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that the shel-
ter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of
the paths were drying up with the haste which pud-
dles have to make in Germany, between rains, if they
are ever going to dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well

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served, and he was sincerely obliging in the English
he had learned as a waiter in London. Mrs. March
made haste to ask him if a jonng American of the
name of Bumamy had been staying with him a few
weeks before; and she described Bumamy's beauty
and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he
had been a woman, could not have failed to remem-
ber him. But he failed, with a real grief, apparently,
and certainly a real politeness, to recall either his name
or his person. The landlord was an intelligent, good-
looking young fellow ; he told them that he was lately
married, and they liked him so much that they were
sorry to see him afterward privately boxing the ears
of the piccolo, the waiter's little understudy. Perhaps
the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not have
witnessed his punishment; his being in a dress -coat
seemed to make it also an indignity.

'In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the
old Orangery of the Schloss for a cup of tea, and
found themselves in the company of several Ansbach
ladies who had brought their work, in the evident
habit of coming there every afternoon for their coffee
and for a dish of gossip. They were kind, uncomely,
motherly looking bodies ; one of them combed her hair
at the table ; and they all sat outside of the cafe with
their feet on the borders of the puddles which had not
dried up there in the shade of the building. A deep
lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows
of trees, stretched before them with the sunset light on
it, and it was all very quiet and friendly. The tea
brought to the Marches was brewed from some herb
apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked
like willow leaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove
in each cup, and they sat contentedly over it and tried
to make out what the Ansbach ladies were talking

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about. These had recognized the strangers for Amer-
icanSy and one of them explained that Americans spoke
the same language as the English and yet were not
quite the same people.

" She differs from the girl in the book-store," said
March, translating to his wife. " Let us get away
before she says that we are not so nice as the Eng-
lish," and they made off toward the avenue of trees
beyond the lawn.

There were a few people walking up and down in
the alley, making the most of the moment of dry
weather. They saluted one another like acquaint-
an(res, and three clean-shaven, walnut-faced old peas-
ants bowed in response to March's stare, with a self-
respectful civility. They were yeomen of the region
of Ansbach, where the country round about is dotted
with their cottages, and not held in vast homeless tracts
by the nobles as in North Germany.

The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March
at breakfast, not without a certain tacit pride in it to
the disadvantage of the Prussians, was at the supper-
table, and was disposed to more talk, which he man-
aged in a stout, slow English of his own. He said he
had never really spoken English with an English-speak-
ing person before, or at all since he studied it in school
at Munich.

" I should be afraid to put my school-boy German
against your English," March said, and, when he had
understood, the other laughed for pleasure, and report-
ed the compliment to his wife in their own parlance.
" You Germans certainly beat us in languages."

" Oh, well," he retaliated, " the Americans beat us
in some other things," and Mrs. March felt that this
was but just; she would have liked to mention a few,
but not ungraciously; she and the German lady kej)t

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smiling across the table, and trying detached vocables
of their respective tongues upon each other.

The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but was
in Ansbach on an affair of business; he asked March
if he were not going to see the manoeuvres somewhere.
Till now the manoeuvres had merely been the inter-
esting background of their travel; but now, hearing
that the Emperor of Germany, the King of Saxony,
the Regent of Bavaria, and the King of Wiirtemberg,
the Grand-Dukes of Weimar and Baden, with visiting
potentates of all sorts, and innumerable lesser high-
hotes, foreign and domestic, were to be present^ Mrs.
March resolved that they must go to at least one of
the reviews.

" If you go to Frankfort, you can see the King of
Italy, too,'* said the Bavarian, but he owned that they
probably could not get into a hotel there, and he asked
why they should not go to Wiirzburg, where they could
see all the sovereigns except the King of Italy.

" Wiirzburg ? Wiirzburg ?" March queried of his
wife. " Where did we hear of that place ?"

^' Isn*t it where Bumamy said Mr. StoUer had left
his daughters at school V^

" So it is I And is that on the way to the Rhine ?" he
asked the Bavarian.

" ^"0, no 1 Wiirzburg is on the Main, about five
hours from Ansbach. And it is a very interesting
place. It is where the good wine comes from.'*

" Oh yes," said March, and in their rooms his wife
got out all their guides and maps and began to inform
herself and to inform him about Wiirzburg. But first
she said it was very cold and he must order some fire
made in the tall German stove in their parlor. The
maid who came said " Gleich," but she did not come
back, and about the time they were getting furious at

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her neglect they began getting warm. He put his hand
on the stove and found it hot; then he looked down for
a door in the stove where he might shut a damper ; there
was no door.

" Good Heavens !" he shouted. " It's like something
in a dream/' and he ran to pull the bell for help.

" No, no ! Don't ring ! It will make us ridiculous.
They'll think Americans don't know anything. There
must be some way of dampening the stove; and if
there isn't, I'd rather suffocate than give myself away."
Mrs. March ran and opened the window, while her
husband carefully examined the stove at every point,
and explored the pipe for the damper in vain. " Can't
you find it f ' The night wind came in raw and damp,
and threatened to blow their lamp out, and she was
obliged to shut the window.

" Not a sign of it. I will go down and ask the land-
lord in strict confidence how they dampen their stoves
in Ansbach."

" Well, if you must. It's getting hotter every mo-
ment." She followed him timorously into the corridor,
lit by a hanging-lamp, turned low for the night.

He looked at his watch ; it was eleven o'clock. " I'm
afraid they're all in bed."

" Yes ; you mustn't go ! We must try to find out for
ourselves. What can that door be for ?"

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in
the wall near their room, and it yielded to his pull.
"G^t a candle," he whispered, and when she brought
it he stooped to enter the doorway.

^' Oh, do you think you'd better ?" she hesitated.

"You can come, too, if you're afraid. You've al-
ways said you wanted to die with me."

" Well. " But you go first."

He disappeared within, and then came back to the

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doorway. " Just come in here a moment." She found
herself in a sort of antechamber, half the height of her
own room, and following his gesture she looked down
where in one comer some crouching monster seemed
showing its fiery teeth in a grin of derision. This grin
was the damper of their stove, and this was where the
maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them
alive, and was still joyously chuckling to itself. " I
think that Munich man was wrong. I don^t believe
we beat the Germans in anything. There isn't a hotel
in the United States where the stoves have no front
doors, and every one of them has the space of a good-
sized flat given up to the convenience of kindling a fire
in it.''

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March
was awakened to a rainy morning by the clinking of
cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the long, irregular
square l>efore the hotel, and he hurried out to see the
passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres.
They were troops of all arms, but mainly infantry, and
as they stumped heavily through the groups of apa-
thetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots they took
the steady downpour on their dripping helmets. Some
of them were smoking, but none smiling, except one
gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid on the
sidewalk. An old officer halted his staff to scold a citi-
zen who had given him a mistaken direction. The
shame of the erring man was great, and the pride of
a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less, though
the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used
them with equal scorn ; the younger officers listened in-
differently round on horseback behind the glitter of
their eye-glasses, and one of them amused himself by
turning the silver bangles on his wrist.

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Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March
crossed the bridge spanning the gardens in what had
been the city moat, and found his way to the market-
place, under the walls of the old Gtothic church of St.
Gimipertus. The market, which spread pretty well
over the square, seemed to be also a fair, with peas-
ants' clothes and local pottery for sale, as well as fruits
and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old
women squatting before them. It was all as pict-
uresque as the markets used to be in Montreal and
Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding
journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flow-
ers to carry back to his wife that a little girl, who
saw his arm -load from her window as he returned,
laughed at him and then drew shyly back. Her laugh
reminded him how many happy children he had seen in
Germany, and how freely they seemed to play every-
where, with no one to make them afraid. When they
grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose
rude toil the soldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took
them absently, and made him join her in watching
the sight which had fascinated her in the street under
their windows. A slender girl, with a waist as slim
as a corseted officer's, from time to time came out of
the house across the way to the firewood which had
been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there.
Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot
logs and disappeared with them in-doors. Once sho
paused from her work to joke with a well-dressed man
who came by, and seemed to find nothing odd in her
work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over-
head watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.

" What do you think of thatV asked Mrs. March.

" I think it's good exercise for the girl, and I should

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like to recommend it to those fat fellows at the win-
dow. I suppose she'll saw the wood in the cellar, and
then lug it up-stairs, and pile it up in the stoves' dress-
ing-rooms."

" Uon't laugh ! It's too disgraceful."

"Well, I don't know! If you like, I'll offer these
gentlemen across the way your opinion of it in the lan-
guage of Goethe and Schiller."

" I wish you'd offer my opinion of them. They've
been staring in here with an opera-glass."

'^ Ah, that's a different affair. There isn't much go-
ing on in Ansbach, and thev have to make the most
of it."

The lower casements of the houses were furnished
with mirrors set at right angles with them, and noth-
ing which went on in the streets was lost. Some of
the streets were long and straight, and at rare mo-
ments they lay full of sun. At such times the Marches
were puzzled by the sight of citizens carrying open
umbrellas, and they wondered if they had forgotten to
put them down, or thought it not worth while in the
brief respites from the rain, or were profiting by such
rare occasions to dry them; and some other sights re-
mained baffling to the last. Once a man with his hands
pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolid-
ly after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed
under their windows ; but who he was, or what he had
done or was to suffer, they never knew. Another time
a pair went by on the way to the railway station: a
young man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and
a very decent-looking old woman lugging a heavy carpet
bag, who left them to the lasting question whether she
was the young man's servant in her best clothes, or
merely his mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however^

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the sacristans being men, as the Marches found when
they went to complete their impression of the courtly
past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the
margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In
the little ex-margravely capital there was something
of the neighborly interest in the curiosity of strangers
which endears Italian witness. The white-haired
street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his
broom to guide them to the house of the sacristan,
might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and tho
old sacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of
an upper window and professed his willingness to
show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying
"Gleich!'' instead of "Subito!" The architecture of
the houses was a party to the illusion. St Johannis,
like the older church of St. Oumpertus, is Gothic, with
the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ans-
bach ; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they
both stand the dwellings are Gothic, too, and might be
in Hamburg ; but at the St Johannis end they seem to
have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a
sort of Teutonized Renaissance.

The rococo margraves and margravines used, of
course, to worship in St. Johannis Church. Now they
all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in the crypt of
the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and mar-
ble, with draperies of black samite, more and more
fimerally vainglorious to the last. Their courtly cof-
fins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with the little
coffins of the children that died before they came to
the knowledge of their greatness. On one of these a
kneeling figurine in bronze holds up the effigy of the
child within; on another the epitaph plays tenderly
with the fate of a little princess, who died in her first
year.

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In the Rose-month was this sweet Rose taken.

For the Rose-kind hath she earth forsaken.

The Princess is the Rose, that here no longer blows.

From the stem by death's hand rudely shaken.

Then rest in the Rose-house.

Little Princess-Rosebud dear!

There life's Rose shall bloom again

In Heaven's sunshine clear.

While March struggled to get this into English
words, two German ladies, who had made themselves of
his party, passed reverently away and left him to pay
the sacristan alone.

" That is all right," he said, when he came out " I
think we got the most value; and they didn^t look as
if they could afford it so well; though you never can
tell, here. These ladies may be the highest kind of
highhotes practising a praiseworthy economy. I hope
the lesson won't be lost on us. They have saved enough
by us for their coffee at the Orangery. Let us go and
have a little willow-leaf tea !''

The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it
had kept of the days when an Orangery was essential
to the self-respect of every sovereign prince, and of
so many private gentlemen. On their way they al-
ways passed the statue of Count Platen, the dull poet
whom Heine's hate would have delivered so cruelly
over to an immortality of contempt, but who stands
there near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted
with flowers, and ignores his brilliant enemy in the
comfortable durability of bronze; and there always
awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of Kas-
par Hawser's fate, which his murder affixes to it with
a red stain.

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe they
went up into that nook of the plantation where the

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simple shaft of church-warden's Gothic commemorateB
the assassination on the spot where it befell. Here
the hapless youth, whose mystery will never be fath-
omed on earth, used to come for a little respite from
his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesick for the kind-
ness of his Nuremberg friends ; and here his murderer
found him and dealt him the mortal blow.

March lingered upon the last sad circumstance of
the tragedy in which the wounded boy dragged him-
self home, to suffer the suspicion and neglect of his
guardian till death attested his good faith beyond cavil.
He said this was the hardest thing to bear in all his
story, and that he would like to have a look into the
soul of the dull, unkind wretch who had so misread his
charge. He was going on with an inquiry that pleased
him much when his wife pulled him abruptly away.

" Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascination of
it, and you are wanting to take the material from Bur-
namy !"

" Oh, well, let him have the material ; he will spoil
it. And I can always reject it, if he offers it to Every
Other Week:'

" I could believe, after your behavior to that poor
woman about her son in Jersey City, you're really-
capable of it."

" What comprehensive inculpation ! I had forgotten
about that poor woman."

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XIII

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg
banker to send them came just as they were leaving
Ansbaeh. The landlord sent them down to the sta-
tion, and Mrs. March opened them in the train, and
read them first so that she could prepare him if there
were anything annoying in them, as well as indulge
her livelier curiosity.

" They^re from both the children,^' she said, with-
out waiting for him to ask. " Tou can look at them
later. There's a very nice letter from Mrs. Adding to
me, and one from dear little Rose for you." Then
she hesitated, with her hand on a letter faced down
in her lap. " And there's one from Agatha Triscoe,
which I wonder what you'll think of." She delayed
again, and then flashed it open before him, and waited
with a sort of impassioned patience while he read it.

He read it and gave it back to her. " There doesn't
seem to be very much in it"

" That's it! ^ Don't you think I had a right to there
being something in it, after all I did for her ?"

" I always hoped you hadn't done anything for her,
but if you have, why should she give herself away on
paper ? It's a very proper letter."

"It's a little too proper, and it's the last I shall

have to do with her. She knew that I should be on

pins and needles till I heard how her father had taken

Bumamy's being there that night, and she doesn't say

a word about it."

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"The general may have had a tantrum that she
couldn't describe. Perhaps she hasn't told him yet."

"She would tell him instantly P^ cried Mrs. March,
who began to find reason in the supposition, as well as
comfort for the hurt which the girPs reticence had
given her. " Or if she wouldn't, it would be because
she was waiting for the best chance."

" That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult
father. She may be waiting for the best chance to say
how he took it. Xo, I'm all for Miss Triscoe, and I
hope that now, if she's taken herself off our hands,
she'll keep oflF."

"It's altogether likely that he's made her promise
not to tell me anything about it," Mrs. March mused
aloud.

" That would be unjust to a person who had be-
haved so discreetly as you have," said her husband.

They were on their way to Wiirzburg, and at the
first station, which was a junction, a lady mounted to
their compartment just before the train began to move.
She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been
pretty, but she bore herself with a kind of authority
in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-
dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English tasteless-
ness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding
place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a com-
mercial traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it,
and March offered her his seat. She accepted it very
promptly, and thanked him for it in the English of
a German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a gov-
erness who had been teaching in England and had ac-
quired the national feeling for dress. But in this
character she found her interesting, and even a little
pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which
the other met eagerly enough. They were now run-

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ning among low hills, not so picturesque as those be-
tween Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same toy-
like quaintness in the villages dropped here and there
in their valleys. One small town, completely walled,
with its gray houses and red roofs, showed through the
green of its trees and gardens so like a colored print
in a child's story-book that Mrs. March cried out for
joy in it, and then accounted for her rapture by ex-
plaining to the stranger that they were Americans and
had never been in Germany before. The lady was not
visibly affected by the fact ; she said, casually, that she
had often been in that little town, which she named;
her uncle had a castle in the country back of it, and she
came with her husband for the shooting in the autumn.
By a natural transition she spoke of her children, for
whom she had an English governess; she said she had
never been in England, but had learned the language
from a governess in her own childhood; and through
it all Mrs. March perceived that she was trying to im-
press them with her consequence. To humor her pose,
she said they had been looking up the scene of Kaspar
Ilauser's death at Ansbach; and at this the stranger
launched into such intimate particulars concerning him,
and was so familiar at first hands with the facts of his
life, that Mrs. March let her run on, too much amused
with her pretensions to betray any doubt of her. She
wondered if March were enjoying it all as much, and
from time to time she tried to catch his eye, while the
lady talked constantly and rather loudly, helping her-
self out with words from them both when her English
failed her. In the safety of her perfect understanding
of the case, Mrs. March now submitted farther, and
even suffered some patronage from her, which in an-
other mood she would have met with a decided snub.
As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopes

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of the Wiirzhurg hills, the stranger said she was going
to change there, and take a train on to Berlin. Mrd.
March wondered whether she would be able to keep
up the comedy to the last; and she had to own that
she carried it off very easily when the friends whom
she was eicpecting did not meet her on the arrival of
their train. She refused March's offers of help, and
remained quietly seated while he got out their wraps
and bags. She returned with a hardy smile the cold
leave Mrs. March took of her ; and when a porter came
to the door, and forced his way by the Marches, to ask
with anxious servility if she were the Baroness von

, she bade the man get them a traeger and then

come back for her. She waved them a complacent
adieu before they mixed with the crowd and lost sight
of her.

" Well, my dear," said Sfarch, addressing the snob-
bishness in his wife which he knew to be so wholly
impersonal, "youVe mingled with one highhote, any-
way. I must say she didn't look it, any more than
the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, and yet she's only
a baroness. Think of our being three hours in the
same compartment, and she doing all she could to im-
press us, and our getting no good of it! I hoped you
were feeling her quality, so that we should have it in
the family, anyway, and always know what it was like.
But so far, the highhotes have all been terribly disap-
pointing."

He teased on as they followed the traeger with their
baggage out of the station ; and in the omnibus on the
way to their hotel, he recurred to the loss they had
suffered in the baroness's failure to dramatize her no-
bility effectually. '* After all, perhaps she was as much
disappointed in us. I don't suppose we looked any
more like democrats than she looked like an aristocrat"

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"But there's a great difFerence," Mrs. March re-
turned at last. " It isn't at all a parallel case. We
were not real democrats, and she was a real aristocrat."

" To be sura There is that way of looking at it.
That's rather novel ; I wish I had tiought of that my-
self. She was certainly more to blame than we were."

The square in front of the station was planted with
flag-poles wreathed in evergreens; a triumphal arch
was nearly finished, and a colossal allegory in imita-
tion bronze was well on the way to completion, in
honor of the majesties who were coming for the
manceuvres. The streets which the omnibus passed
through to the Swan Inn were draped with the im-
perial German and the royal Bavarian colors ; and the
standards of the visiting nationalities decked the fronts
of the houses where their military attaches were lodged ;
but the Marches failed to see our own banner, and were
spared for the moment the ignominy of finding it over
an apothecary shop in a retired avenue. The sun had
come out, the sky overhead was of a smiling blue ; and
they felt the gala-day glow and thrill in the depths of
their inextinguishable youth.

The Swan Inn sits on one of the long quays bor-
dering the Main, and its windows look down upon the
bridges and shipping of the river; but the traveller
reaches it by a door in the rear, through an archway
into a back street, where an odor dating back to the
foundation of the city is waiting to welcome him. The
landlord was there, too, and he greeted the ^Marches so
cordially that they fully partook his grief in being able
to offer them rooms on the front of the house for two
nights only. They reconciled themselves to the neces-
sity of then turning out for the staff of the King of
Saxony, the more readily because they knew that there

was no hope of better things at any other hoteL

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The rooms which they could have for the time were
charming, and they came down to supper in a glazed
gallery looking out on the river picturesque with craft
of all fashions: with row-boats, sail-boats, and little
steamers, but mainly with long, black barges built up
into houses in the middle, and defended each by a lit-
tle nervous German dog. Long rafts of logs weltered
in the sunset red which painted the swift current and
mantled the immeasurable vineyards of the hills around
like the color of their ripening grapes. Directly in face
rose a castled steep, which kept the ranging walls and
the bastions and battlements of the time when such
a stronghold could have defended the city from foes
without or from tumult within. The arches of a state-
ly bridge spanned the river sunsetward, and lifted a
succession of colossal figures against the crimson sky.

" I guess we have been wasting our time, my dear,'*
said March, as they turned from this beauty to the
question of supper. " I wish we had always been
here!''

Their waiter had put them at a table in a division
of the gallery beyond that which they entered, where
some groups of officers were noisily supping. There
was no one in their room but a man whose face was
indistinguishable against the light, and two young girls
who glanced at them with looks at once quelled and
defiant, and then after a stare at the officers in the
gallery beyond, whispered together with suppressed
giggling. The man fed on without noticing them,
except now and then to utter a growl that silenced
the whispering and giggling for a moment The
Marches, from no positive evidence of any sense, de-
cided that they were Americans.

" I don't know that I feel responsible for them as
their fellow-countryman; I should once," he said.

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" It isn't that. It's the worry of trying to make out
why they are just what they are," his wife returned.

The girls drew the man's attention to them and he
looked at them for the first time; then after a sort of
hesitation he went on with his supper. They had only
begun theirs when he rose with the two girls, whom
Mrs. March now saw to be of the same size and dressed
alike, and came heavily toward them.

" I thought you was in Carlsbad," he said, bluntly,
to March, with a nod at Mrs. March. He added, with
a twist of his head toward the two girls, " My daugh-
ters," and then left them to her, while he talked on
with her husband. " Come to see this foolery, I sup-
pose. I'm on my way to the woods for my after-cure ;
but I thought I might as well stop and give the girls
a chance ; they got a week's vacation, anyway." Stoller
glanced at them with a sort of troubled tenderness in
his strong, dull face.

" Oh ves. I understood thev were at school here,"
said March, and he heard one of them saying, in a
sweet, high pipe to his wife :

"Ain't it just splendid? I ha'n't seen anything
equal to it since the Worrld's Fairr." She spoke with
a strong contortion of the Western r, and her sister
hastened to put in :

" I don't think it's to be compared with the Worrld's
Fairr. But these German girrls, here, just think it's
great. It just does me good to laff at 'em about it I
like to tell 'em about the electric fountain and the
Courrt of Honorr when they get to talkin' about the
illuminations they're goun' to have. You goun' out to
the parade? You better engage your carriage right
away if you arre. The carrs '11 be a perfect jam.
Father's engaged ourrs; he had to pay sixty marrks
forr it."

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They chattered on without shyness and on as easy
terms with a woman of three times their years as if
she had been a girl of their own age; they willingly
took the whole talk to themselves, and had left her
quite outside of it before StoUer turned to her.

" I been telling Mr. March, here, that you better
both come to the parade with us. I guess my two-
spanner will hold five; or, if it won^t, we'll make it
I don't believe there's a carriage left in Wiirzbupg;
and if you go in the cars, you'll have to walk three or
four miles before you get to the parade-ground. You
think it over," he said to March. " Nobody else is
going to have the places, anyway, and you can say
yes at the last minute just as well as now."

He moved off with his girls, who looked over their
shoulders at the officers as they passed on through the
adjoining room.

"My dearP^ cried Mrs. March. "Didn't you sup-
pose he classed us with Burnamy in that business ?
Why should he be polite to us ?"

" Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters.
He's probably heard of your performance at the Kur-
haus ball. But he knows that I thought Burnamy in
the wrong. This may be Stoller's way of wiping out
an obligation. Wouldn't you like to go with him ?"

" The mere thought of his being in the same town
is prostrating. I'd far rather he hated us; then he
would avoid us."

" Well, he doesn't own the town, and if it comes to
the worst perhaps wc can avoid him. Let us go out,
anyway, and see if we can't."

" No, no ; I'm too tired ; but you go. And get all
the maps and guides you can; there's so very little in
Baedeker, and almost nothing in that great hulking
Bradshaw of yours; and I'm sure there must be the

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most interesting history of Wiirzburg. Isn't it strange
that we haven't the slightest association with the
name ?"

" I've been rummaging in my mind, and I've got
hold of an association at last," said March. " It's
beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloon window: Wiirz-
burger Hof-Brau,^^

" No matter if it is beer. Find some sketch of the
history, and we'll try to get away from the Stollers in
it. I pitied those wild girls, too. What crazy im-
ages of the world must fill their empty minds! How
their ignorant thoughts must go whirling out into the
unknown ! I don't envy their father. Do hurry back !
I shall be thinking about them every instant till you
come."

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so
soothing to sit looking through the long twilight at
the lovely landscape that the sort of bruise given by
their encounter with the Stollers had left her con-
sciousness before March returned. She made him ad-
mire first the convent church on a hill farther up the
river which exactly balanced the fortress in front of
them, and then she seized upon the little books he had
brought, and set him to exploring the labyrinths of
their Qierman, with a mounting exultation in his dis-
coveries. There was a general guide to the city, and
a special guide, with plans and personal details of the
approaching manoeuvres and the princes who were to
figure in them; and there was a sketch of the local
history: a kind of thing that the Germans know how
to write particularly well, with little gleams of pleas-
ant himaor blinking through it. For the study of this,
Mrs. March realized, more and more passionately, that
they were in the very most central and convenient

point, for the historv of Wiirzburg might be said to

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have begun with her prince-bishops, whose rule had be-
gun in the twelfth century, and who had built, on a
forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg
on that vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn.
There had, of course, been history before that, but
nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell, nothing
that so united the glory of this world and the next as
that of the prince-bishops. They had made the Marien-
burg their home, and kept it against foreign and do-
mestic foes for five hundred years. Shut within its
well-armed walls, they had awed the of ten - turbulent
city across the Main ; they had held it against tho' em-
battled farmers in the Peasants' War, and had splen-
didly lost it to Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back
again and held it till Napoleon took it from them. He
gave it with their flock to the Bavarians, who in turn
briefly yielded it to the Prussians in 1866, and were
now in apparently final possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Bar-
barossa had come and gone, and since the prince-
bishops there had been visiting thrones and kingdoms
enough in the .ancient city, which was soon to be illus-
trated by the presence of imperial Germany, royal
Wiirtemberg and Saxony, grand-ducal Baden and Wei-
mar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates among
those who speak the beautiful language of the Ja,

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops
from that supreme place which they had at once taken
in Mrs. March's fancy. The potentates were all going
to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops
had built themselves in Wiirzburg as soon as they found
it safe to come down from their stronghold of Marien-
burg, and begin to adorn their city, and to confirm it
in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had
come up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he

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ivrouglit year after year, in that worldly taste which
has somehow come to express the most sovereign mo-
ment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally
in Wiirzhurg that it left her with the name of the
Rococo City, intrenched in a period of time equally
remote from early Christianity and modem Protestant-
ism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thou-
sand are now of the reformed religion, and these bear
about the same relation to the Catholic spirit of the
place that the Gothic architecture bears to the baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wiirzburgers
got on very well with but one newspaper, and perhaps
the smallest amount of merrymaking known outside
of the colony of Jktassachusetts Bay at the same epoch-
The prince-bishops had their finger in everybody's pie,
and they portioned out the cakes and ale, which were
made according to formulas of their own. The dis-
tractions were all of a religious character; churches,
convents, monasteries abounded; ecclesiastical proces-
sions and solemnities were the spectacles that edified if
they did not amuse the devout population.

It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all this
spiritual severity that one of the greatest modem sci-
entific discoveries should have been made in Wiirzhurg,
and that the Rontgen rays should now be giving her
name a splendor destined to eclipse the glories of her
past.

Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so;

or, at least, that the name of Rontgen would ever lend

more lustre to his city than that of Longfellow's Wal-

ther von der Vogelweide. She was no less surprised

than pleased to realize that this friend of the birds was

a Wiirzburger, and she said that their first pilgrimage

in the morning should be to the church where he lies

buried.

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March went down to breakfast not quite so early as
his wife had planned, and left her to have her coflFee
in her room. He got a pleasant table in the gallery-
overlooking the river, and he decided that the land-
scape, though it now seemed to be rather too much
studied from a drop-curtain, had certainly lost nothing
of its charm in the clear morning light The waiter
brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came
back with a card which he insisted was for March.
It was not till he put on his glasses and read the
name of Mr. E. M. Kenby that he was able at all to
agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

" Well," he said, '* why wasnH this card sent up last
night?"

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just
given him his card, after asking March's nationality,
and was then breakfasting in the next room. March
caught up his napkin and ran roimd the partition wall,
and Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet
him.

" I thotigJit it must be you," he called out, joyfully,
as they struck their extended hands together, "but so
many people look alike nowadays that I don't trust
my eyes any more."

Tvenby said he had spent the time since they last
met partly in Leipsic and partly in Gotha, where ho
had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty German.
As soon as he realized that Wiirzburg was so near h^j
had slipped down from Gotha for a glimpse of the
manoeuvres. He added that he supposed March was
there to see them, and he asked with a quite unem-
barrassed smile if they had met Mrs. Adding in Carls-
bad, and, without heeding March's answer, he laughed
and added : " Of course, I know she must have told
Mrs. March all about it."

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March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though
in his wife's absence he felt bound to forbid himself
anything more explicit.

" I don't give it up, you know," Kenby went on,
with perfect ease. "I'm not a young fellow, if you
call thirty-nine old."

" At my age I don't," March put in, and they roared
together, in men's security from the encroachments of
time.

" But she happens to be the only woman I've ever
really wanted to marry, for more than a few days at
a stretch. You know how it is with us."

" Oh yes, I know," said March, and they shouted
again.

" We're in love and we're out of love twenty times.
But this isn't a mere fancy; it's a conviction. :lnd
there's no reason why she shouldn't marry me."

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost
upon Kenby. " You mean the boy," he said. " Well,
I like Rose," and now March really felt swept from
his feet. " She doesn't deny that she likes me, but
she seems to think that her marrying again will take
her from him; the fact is, it will only give me to
him. As for devoting her whole life to him, she
couldn't do a worse thing for him. What the boy
needs is a man's care and a man's will — Good
heavens! You don't think I could ever be unkind
to the little soul?" Kenby threw himself forward
over the table.

" My dear fellow !" March protested.

"I'd rather cut off my right hand!" Kenby pur-
sued, excitedly, and then he said, with a humorous
drop : " The fact is, I don't believe I should want her
so much if I couldn't have Rose, too. I want to have
them both. So far, I've only got no for an answer;

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but I'm not going to keep it. I had a letter from Hose
at Carlsbad the other day; and — "

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of
paper on his salver, which March knew must be from
his wife. " What is keeping you so V^ she wrote. " I
am all ready." " It's from Mrs. March," he explained
to Kenby. "I am going out with her on some er-
rands. I'm awfully glad to see you again. We mv^t
talk it all over, and you must — ^you mustn't— Mrs.
March will want to see you later — ^I — Are you in
the hotel ?"

" Oh yes. I'll see you at the one-o'clock table d'hote,
I suppose."

March went away with his head whirling in the
question whether he should tell his wife at once of
Kenby's presence, or leave her free for the pleasures
of Wiirzburg, till he could shape the fact into some
safe and acceptable form. She met him at the door
with her guide-books, wraps, and umbrellas, and would
hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

" Now, I want you to avoid the StoUers as far as
you can see them. This is to be a real wedding-jour-
ney day, with no extraneous acquaintance to bother;
the more strangers the better. Wiirzburg is richer than
anything I imagined. I've looked it all up; I've got
the plan of the city, so that we can easily find the way.
We'll walk first, and take carriages whenever we get
tired. We'll go to the cathedral at once ; I want a good
gulp of rococo to begin with ; there wasn't half enough
of it at Ansbach. Isn't it strange how we've come
round to it ?"

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which
they had obediently imbibed from Ruskin in the days
of their early Italian travel and courtship, when all
the English-speaking world bowed down to him in de-

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vout aversion from the Renaissance and pious abhor-
rence of the rococo.

"What biddable little things we werel" she went
on, while March was struggling to keep Kenby in the
background of his consciousness. " The rococo must
have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we
were pinning our faith to pointed arches; and yet I
suppose we Avere perfectly sincere. Oh, looh at that
divinely ridiculous Madonna!" They were now mak-
ing their way out of the crooked footway behind their
hotel toward Ihe street leading to the cathedral, and she
pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the door of some
religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet,
her body twisting to show the sculptor's mastery of
anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with
the help of stout gilt rays. In fact, the Virgin's whole
figure was gilded, and so was that of the Child in her
arras. " Isn't she delightful ?"

" I see what you mean," said March, with a dubious
glance at the statue, " but I'm not sure, now, that I
wouldn't like something quieter in my Madonnas."

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with
the cathedral ending the perspective, was full of the
holiday so near at hand. The narrow sidewalks were
thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and
up the middle of the street detachments of military
came and went, halting the little horse-cars and the
huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed to have the
sole right to the streets of Wiirzburg; they came jing-
ling or thundering out of the side streets and hurled
themselves round the comers reckless of the passers,
who escaped alive by flattening themselves like posters
against the house walls. There were peasants, men
and women, in the costume which the unbroken course

of their country life had kept as quaint as it was a

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hundred years before; there were citizens in the mis-
fits of the latest German fashions; there were soldiers
of all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to
time there were pretty yoimg girls in white dresses
with low necks, and bare arms gloved to the elbows,
who were following a holiday custom of the place in
going about the streets in ball costume. The shop
windows were filled with portraits of the Emperor and
the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies of
his family; the Gterman and Bavarian colors draped
the facades of the houses and festooned the fantastic
Madonnas posing above so many portals. The modern
patriotism included the ancient piety without disturb-
ing it; the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through
its new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it by
the long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovc^r-
eignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they
entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken
hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far
from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose.
There are a few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps
more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved
by the Wiirzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For
once one sees what that style can do in architecture
and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details,
one cannot deny that there is a prodigiously effective
keeping in it all. This interior came together, as the
decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had
felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo.
It was unimpeachably perfect in its way. "Just,'*
March murmured to his wife, *' as the social and po-
litical and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century
was perfected in certain times and places. But the
odd thing is to find the apotheosis of the rococo away

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up here in Germany. I wonder how much the prince-
bishops really liked it But they had become rococo,
tool Look at that row of their statues on both sides
of the nave! What magnificent swells! How they
abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to
get behind the pillar ; he knows that he could never lend
himself to the baroque style. It expresses the eigh-
teenth century, though. But how you long for some
little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth 1"

"I don't," she whispered back. "Fm perfectly
wild with Wiirzburg. I like to have a thing go as far
as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic I
could get, and in Wiirzburg I want all the baroque I
can get. / am consistent."

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as
women do, all the way to the Neuraiinster Church,
where they were going to revere the tomb of Walther
von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as
for Longfellow's. The older poet lies buried within,
but his monument is outside the church, perhaps for
the greater convenience of the sparrows, which now
represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is sur-
mounted by a broad vase, and around this are thickly
perched the efligies of the Meistersinger's feathered
friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs.
March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago di-
rected his bequest to themselves. In revenge for their
lawless greed, the defrauded beneficiaries choose to bur-
lesque the affair by looking like the four-and-twenty
blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic
Marienkapelle with her husband in the revival of his
medifieval taste, and she was rewarded amid its thir-
teenth-century sincerity by his recantation. "You
are right! Baroque is the thing for Wiirzburg; one

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can't enjoy Gothic here any more than one could enjoy;
baroque in Nuremberg."

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage
and went to visit the palace of the prince-bishops who
had so well known how to niake the heavenly take the
image and superscription of the worldly; and they
were jointly indignant to find it shut against the pub-
lic in preparation for the imperialities and royalties
coming to occupy it. They were in time for the noon
guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that
the way the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the
high martial step of the German soldiers was a perfect
expression of the insolent militarism of their empire,
and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven
that one was an American and a republican. She
softened a little toward their system when it proved
that the garden of the palace was still open, and yet
more when she sank down upon a bench between two
marble groups representing the Rape of Proserpine
and the Rape of Europa. They stood each in a grav-
elled plot, thickly overnm by a growth of ivy, and the
vine climbed the white, naked limbs of the nymphs,
who were present on a pretence of gathering flowers,
but really to pose at the spectators, and clad them to
the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never
meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was
an old fountain near, its stone rim and centre of rock-
work green with immemorial mould, and its basin
quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall
of spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of
early autumn fell from the trees overhead upon the
elderly pair where they sat, and a little company of
sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though
the square without was so all astir with festive expecta-
tion, there were few people in the garden ; three or four

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peasant women in densely fluted white skirts and red
aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Eu-
ropa and at the Proserpine.

It was a precious moment, in which the charm of
the city's past seemed to culminate, and they were
loath to break it by speech.

" Why didn't we have something like all this on
our first wedding journey ?" she sighed at last. " To
think of our battening from Boston to Niagara and
back! And how hard we tried to make something of
Rochester and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec !"

" Niagara wasn't so bad," he said, " and I will never
go back on Quebec."

" Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leip-
sic, and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and
Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a compensation
for our lost youth. But I can't enjoy it as I could
when I was young. It's wasted on my sere and yel-
low leaf. I wish Bumamy and Miss Triscoe were
here ; I should like to try this garden on them."

** They wouldn't care for it," he replied, and upon
a daring impulse he added, " Kenby and Mrs. Adding
might." If she took this suggestion in good part, he
could tell her that Kenby was in Wiirzburg.

" Don't spcah of them ! They're in just that be-
sotted early middle -age when life has settled into a
self-satisfied present, with no past and no future; the
most philistine, the most bourgeois moment of exist-
ence. Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation
of all this goes." She rose and put her hand on his
arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive fashion of
her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balus-
traded terrace in the background which had tempted
her.

" It isn't so bad, being elderly," he said. " By that

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time we have accumulated enough past to sit down and
really enjoy its associations. We have got all sorts of
perspectives and points of view. We know * where we
are at.' "

*' I don't mind being elderly. The world's just as
amusing as ever, and lots of disagreeable things have
dropped out. It's the getting more than elderly; it's
the getting old; and then — ^"

They shrank a little closer together and walked on
in silence till he said, " Perhaps there's something else,
something better — somewhere."

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were
pausing for pleasure in the garden tops below, with
the flowery spaces, and the statued fountains all com-
ing together. She put her hand on one of the fat lit-
tle urchin^oups on the stone coping. " I don't want
cherubs when I can have these putti. And those old
prince-bishops didn't, either!"

"I dont suppose they kept a New England con-
science," he said, with a vague smile. " It would be
difficult in the presence of the rococo."

They left the garden through the beautiful gate
which the old court ironsmith Oegg hammered out in
lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and shaped later-
ally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand,
in gracious Louis Quinze curves ; and they looked back
at it in the kind of despair which any perfection in-
spires. They said how feminine it was, how exotic,
how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art
had purified and left eternally charming. They re-
membered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence
with which they would once have condemned it; and
they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but
they certainly admired it, and it remained for them
the supreme expression of that time -soul, mundane,

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courtly, aristocratic, flattering which once influenced
the art of the whole world, and which had here so
curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from
its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed
to austerity. The vast superb palace of the prince-
bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of
sovereigns, imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal,
swelled aloft in superb amplitude ; but it did not real-
ize their historic pride so effectively as this exquisite
work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in its
aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescos which the
travellers knew were swimming and soaring on the
ceilings within, and from which it seemed to accent
their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said.
" Or iron-mongery,'^ he corrected himself upon reflec-
tion.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests,
but he remembered him again when he called a car-
riage and ordered it driven to their hotel. It was the
hour of the Gterman mid-day table d'hote, and they
would be sure to meet him there. The question now
was how March should own his presence in time to
prevent his wife from showing her ignorance of it to
Kenby himself, and he was still turning the question
hopelessly over in his mind when the sight of the
hotel seemed to remind her of a fact which she an-
nounced.

" Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I am not
going to sit through a long table d'hote. I want you
to send me up a simple beefsteak and a cup of tea to
our rooms; and I don't want you to come near for
hours; because I intend to take a whole afternoon
nap. You can keep all the maps and plans and guides,
and you had better go and see what the Volksfest is
like ; it will give you some notion of the part the peo-

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pie are really taking in all this olBcial celebration, and
you know I don't care. Don't come up after dinner to
see how I am getting along; I shall get along; and if
you should happen to wake me after I had dropped
off—"

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at
the reading-room window, waiting for the dinner-hour,
and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs. March as
they passed up the corridor. But she looked so tireil
that he had decided to spare her till she came down
to dinner; and as he sat with March at their soup, he
asked if she were not well.

March explained, and he provisionally invented some
regrets from her that she should not see Kenby till
supper.

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wiirz-
burg wines for their mutual consolation in her ab-
sence, and in the friendliness which it promoted they
agreed to spend the afternoon together. No man is
so inveterate a husband as not to take kindly an oc-
casional release to bachelor companionship, and before
the dinner was over they agreed that they would go
to the Volksfest and get some notion of the popular
life and amusements of Wiirzburg, which was one of
the few places where Kenby had never been before;
and they agreed that they would walk.

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, past
a barrack full of soldiers. They met detachments of
soldiers everywhere, infantry, artillery, cavalry.

" This is going to be a great show," Kenby said,
meaning the manoeuvres; and he added, as if now he
had kept away from the subject long enough and had
a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, ^'I should
like to have Kose see it and get his impressions."

" IVe an idea Rose wouldn't approve of it. His

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mother says his mind is turning more and more to
philanthropy."

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of
Mrs. Adding. " It's one of the prettiest things to see
how she understands Rose. It's charming to see them
together. She wouldn't have half the attraction with-
out him."

" Oh yes," March assented. He had often wondered
how a man wishing to marry a widow managed with
the idea of her children by another marriage; but if
Kenby was honest, it was much simpler than he had
supposed. He could not say this to him, however, and
in a certain embarrassment he had with the conjecture
in his presence he attempted a diversion. " We're
promised something at the Volksfest which will be a
great novelty to us as Americans. Our driver told
us this morning that one of the houses there was built
entirely of wood."

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest,
this civil feature of the great military event at hand,
which the Marches had found largely set forth in tho
progranMne of the parade, did not fully keep the glow-
ing promises made for it; in fact, it could not easily
have done so. It was in a pleasant neighborhood of
new villas such as form the modem quarter of every
German city, and the Volksfest was even more un-
finished than its environment. It was not yet enclosed
by the fence which was to hide its wonders from the
non-paying public, but March and Kenby went in
through an archway where the gate-money was as ef-
fectually collected from them as if they were barred
every other entrance.

The wooden building was easily distinguishable

from the other edifices because these were tents and

booths still less substantial. They did not make out

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its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-
go-rounds, four were beer-gardens, four were restau-
rants, and the rest were devoted to amusements of the
usual country-fair type. Apparently they had little
attraction for country people. The Americans met
few peasants in the grounds, and neither at the Edi-
son kinematograph, where they refreshed their patriot-
ism with some scenes of their native life, nor at the
little theatre where they saw the sports of the arena
revived in the wrestle of a woman with a bear, did any
of the people except tradesmen and artisans seem to be
taking part in the festival expression of the popular
pleasure.

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether by
slight, or by main strength, or by a previous under-
standing with him, was a slender creature, pathetically
small and not altogether plain; and March as they
walked away lapsed into a pensive muse upon her
strange employ. lie wondered how she came to take
it up, and whether she began with the bear when they
were both very young and she could easily throw
him.

*' Well, women have a great deal more strength than
we suppose,'' Kenby began, with a philosophical air
that gave March the hope of some rational conversation.
Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a doting
smile came into his face. " When we went through
the Dresden gallery together. Rose and I were perfect-
ly used up at the end of an hour, but his mother kept
on as long as there was anything to see and came away
as fresh as a peach."

Then March saw that it was useless to expect any-
thing different from him, and he let him talk on about
Mrs. Adding all the rest of the way back to the hotel.
Kenbv seemed only to have begun when they reached

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the door^ and wanted to continue the subject in the
reading-room.

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had
got through the afternoon, and he escaped to her.
He would have told her now that Kenby was in the
house, but he was really so sick of the fact himself
that he could not speak of it at once, and he let her
go on celebrating all she had seen from the window
since she had waked from her long nap. She said
she could never be glad enough that they had come
just at that time. Soldiers had been going by the
whole afternoon, and that made it so feudal.

" Yes," he assented. " But arenH you coming up to
the station with me to see the Prince-Regent arrive?
He's due at seven, you know.''

" I declare, I had forgotten all about it No, I'm
not equal to it. Y'ou must go; you can tell me every-
thing; be sure to notice how the Princess Maria looks;
the last of the Stuarts, you know; and some people
consider her the rightful Queen of England; and I'll
have the supper ordered, and we can go down as soon
as you've got back,"

March felt rather shabby stealing away without
Kenby; but he had really had as much of Mrs. Add-
ing as he could stand for one day, and he was even
beginning to get sick of Rose. Besides, he had not
sent back a line for Every Other Week yet, and he
had made up his mind to write a sketch of the ma-
ncBUvres, To this end he wished to receive an im-
pression of the Prince-Regent's arrival which should
not be blurred or clouded by other interests. His
wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, and
would have helped him out with his observations, but
Kenby would have got in the way, and would have

clogged the movement of his fancy in assigning the

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facts to the parts he would like them to play in the
sketch.

At least he made some such excuses to himself as he
hurried along towdrd the Kaiserstrasse. The draught
of universal interest in that direction had left the other
streets almost deserted, but as he approached the thor-
oughfare he found all the ways blocked, and the horse-
cars, ordinarily so furiously headlong, arrested by the
multiple ranks of spectators on the sidewalks. The
avenue leading from the railway station to the palace
was decorated with flags and garlands, and planted
with the stems of young firs and birches. The door-
ways were crowded, and the windows dense with eager
faces peering out of the draped bunting. The carriage-
way was kept clear by mild policemen who now and
then allowed one of the crowd to cross it.

The crowd was made up mostly of women and
boys, and when March joined them they had already
been waiting an hour for the sight of the princes who
were to bless them with a vision of the faery race
which kings always are to common men. He thought
the people looked dull, and therefore able to bear the
strain of expectation with patience better than a live-
lier race. They relieved it by no attempt at joking;
here and there a dim smile dawned on a weary face,
but it seemed an efl'ect of amiability rather than hu-
mor. There was so little of this, or else it was so
well bridled by the solemnity of the occasion, that not
a man, woman, or child laughed when a bareheaded
maid -servant broke through the lines and ran down
between them with a life-size plaster bust of the Em-
peror William in her arms: she carried it like an
overgro%vn infant, and in alarm at her conspicuous
part she cast frightened looks from side to side with-
out arousing any sort of notice. Undeterred bv her

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failure, a young dog, parted from hia owner and seek-
ing him in the crowd, pursued his search in a wild
flight down the guarded roadway with an air of anx-
iety that in America would have won him thunders
of applause and all sorts of kindly encouragements to
greater speed. But this German crowd witnessed his
progress apparently without interest, and without a
sign of pleasure. They were there to see the Prince-
Regent arrive, and they did not suffer themselves to
be distracted by any preliminary excitement. Sud-
denly the indefinable emotion which expresses the
fulfilment of expectation in a waiting crowd passed
through the multitude, and before he realized it March
was looking into the friendly gray-bearded face of the
Prince-Regent for the moment that his carriage al-
lowed in passing. This came first preceded by four
outriders, and followed by other simple equipages of
Bavarian blue full of highnesses of all grades. Be-
side the Regent sat his daughter-in-law, the Princess
Maria, her silvered hair framing a face as plain and
good as the Regent's, if not so intelligent.

He, in virtue of having been bom in Wiirzburg, is
officially supposed to be specially beloved by his fel-
low-to^vnsmen ; and they now testified their affection
as he whirled through their ranks, bowing right and
left, by what passes in Germany for a cheer. It is
the word Hoch, groaned forth from abdominal depths,
and dismally prolonged in a hollow roar like that which
the mob makes behind the scenes at the theatre be-
fore bursting in visible tumult on the stage. Then the
crowd dispersed, and March came away wondering why
such a kindly looking Prince-Regent should not have
given them a little longer sight of himself, after they
had waited so patiently for hours to see him. But
doubtless in those countries, he concluded, the art of

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keeping the sovereign precious by suffering him to be
rarely and briefly seen is wisely studied.

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby's
presence; and he did so as soon as he sat down to
supper with his wife. " I ought to have told you the
first thing after breakfast. But when I found you in
that mood of having the place all to ourselves I put
it off.''

" You took terrible chances^ my dear,'* she said,
gravely.

"And I have been terribly punished. YouVe no
idea how much Kenby has talked to me about Mrs.
Adding!''

She broke out laughing. "Well, perhaps you've
suffered enough. But you can see now, can't you, that
it would have been awful if I had met him and let out
that I didn't know he was here ?"

" Terrible^ But if I had told, it would have spoiled
the whole morning for you ; you couldn't have thought
of anything else."

" Oh, I don't know," she said, airily. " What should
you think if I told you I had known he was here ever
since last night ?" She went on in delight at the start
he gave. " I saw him come into the hotel while you
were gone for the guide-books, and I determined to
keep it from you as long as I could; I knew it would
worry you. We've both been very nice; and I forgive
you," she hurried on, "because I've really got some-
thing to tell you."

" Don't tell me that Bumamy is here I"

"Don't jump to conclusions! No, Bumamy isn't
here, poor fellow ! And don't suppose that I'm guilty
of concealiDent because I haven't told you before. T
was just thinking whether I wouldn't spare you till
morning, but now I shall let you take the brunt of it.

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Mrs. Adding and Rose are here/^ She gave the fact
time to sink in, and then she added, " And Miss Tris-
coe and her father are here/^

"What is the matter with Major Eltwin and his
wife being here, too ? Are they in our hotel V^

" No, they are not They came to look for rooms
while you were off waiting for the Prince-Regent, and
I saw them. They intended to go to Frankfort for
the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was not
even standing-room there, and so the general tele-
graphed to the Spanischer Hof, and they all came
here. As it is, he will have to room with Rose, and
Agatha and Mrs. Adding will room together. I didn't
think Agatha was looking very well; she looked im-
happy ; I don't believe she's heard from Bumamy yet ;
I hadn't a chance to ask her. And there's something
else that I'm afraid will fairly make you sick."

" Oh no ; go on. I don't think anything can do that,
after an afternoon of Kenby's confidences."

"It's worse than Kenby," she said, with a sigh.
" You know I told you at Carlsbad I thought that
ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs. Adding."

"Kenby? Why,ofco— "

" Don't be stupid, my dear 1 No, not Kenby : Gen-
eral Triscoe. I wish you could have been here to see
him paying her all sorts of silly attentions, and hear
him making her compliments."

" Thank you. I think I'm just as well without it.
Did she pay him silly attentions and compliments,
too?"

"That's the only thing that can make me forgive

her for his wanting her. She was keeping him at

arm's-length the whole time, and she was doing it so

as not to make him contemptible before his daughter."

" It mufit have been hard. And Rose ?"

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"Rose didn't seem very well. He looks thin and
pale ; but he's sweeter than ever. She's certainly com-
moner clay than Rose. N'o, I won't say that! It^s
really nothing but Greneral Triscoe's being an old
goose about her that makes her seem so^ and it isn't
fair."

March went down to his coffee in the morning with
the delicate duty of telling Kenby that Mrs. Adding
was ill town. Kenby seemed to think it quite natural
she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at all
strange that she should come to them with General
Triscoe and his daughter. lie asked if March would
not go with him to call upon her after breakfast, and
as this was in the line of his own instructions from
Mrs. March, he went.

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and
March saw nothing that was not merely friendly, or
at the most fatherly, in the general's behavior toward
her. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they
hid it in a guise of sisterly affection for each other.
At the most, the general showed a gayety which one
would not have expected of him imder any conditions,
and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each
other awake a good deal the night before seemed so
little adapted to call out. He joked with Rose about
their room and their beds, and put on a comradery
with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered
by contrast with the pleasure of the boy and Kenby
in meeting. There was a certain 'question in the at-
titude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby to
account for his presence ; then she relaxed in an effect
of security so tacit that words overstate it, and began
to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked im-
happy, as his wife had said; he thought simply that

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she had grown plainer; l)ut when he reported this,
she lost her patience with him. In a girl, she said,
23lainness was nnhappiness; and she wished to know
when he would ever learn to look an inch below the
surface. She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not
heard from Bumamy since the Emperor's birthday;
that she was at swords'-points with her father, and so
desperate that she did not care what became of her.

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after
his wife had talked herself tired of them all, he pro-
posed going out again to look about the city, where
there was nothing for the moment to remind them of
the presence of their friends or even of their existence.
She answered that she was worrying about all those
people, and trying to work out their problem for them.
He asked why she did not let them work it out them-
selves, as they would have to do after all her worry,
and she said that where her sympathy had been ex-
cited she could not stop worrying, whether it did any
good or not, and she could not respect any one who
could drop things so completely out of his mind as he
could ; she had never been able to respect that in him.

"I know, my dear,'' he assented. "But I don't
think it's a question of moral responsibility; it's a
question of mental structure, isn't it? Your con-
sciousness isn't built in thought-tight compartments,
and one emotion goes all through it and sinks you;
but I simply close the doors and shut the emotion in
and keep on."

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it
out in all its implications, and could not, after their
long experience of each other, realize that she was not
enjoying the joke, too, till she said she saw that he
merely wished to tease. Then, too late, he tried to
share her worry; but she protested that she was not

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worrying at all; that she cared nothing about thc^e
people; that she was nervous, she was tired; and she
wished he would leave her and go out alone.

He found himself in the street again^ and he per-
ceived that he must be walking fast when a voice
called him by name and asked him what his hurry
was. The voice was StoUer's, who got into step with
him and followed the fir^t with a second question.

" Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres with
mer

His bluntness made it easy for March to answer:
" I'm afraid my wife couldn't stand the drive back
and forth.''

'^ Come without her,"

" Thank you. It's very kind of you. I'm not cer-
tain that I shall go at all. If I do, I shall run out by
train and take my chances with the crowd."

Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offence at
the refusal of his offer, or chose to show none. He
said, with the same uncouth abruptness as before:
"Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carls-
bad?"

"Bumamy?"

" M'm."

" No."

" Know where he is ?"

" I don't in the least."

Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried
on before he said : " I got to thinking what ho done —
afterward. He wasn't bound to look out for me; he
might suppose I knew what I was about"

March turned his face and stared in Stoller's, which
he was letting hang forward as he stamped heavily on.
Had the disaster proved less than he had feared, and
did he still want Bumamy's help in patching up the

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broken pieces; or did he really wish to do Bumamy
justice to his friend ?

In any case March's duty was clear. " I think
Bumamy was bound to look out for you, Mr. Stoller,
and I am glad to know that he saw it in the same light."

" I know he did/' said Stoller, with a blaze as from
a long - smouldering fury, " and damn him, I'm not
going to have it. I'm not going to plead the baby
act with him, or with any man. You tell him so
when you get the chance. You tell him I don't hold
him accountable for anything I made him do. That
ain't business; I don't want him around me any more ;
but if he wants to go back to the paper he can have
his place. You tell him I stand by what I done; and
it's all right between him and me. I hain't done
anything about it, the way I wanted him to help me
to; I've let it lay, and I'm a-going to. I guess it ain't
going to do me any harm, after all ; our people hain't
got very long memories; but if it is, let it. You tell
him it's all right."

" I don't know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don't
know that I care to be the bearer of your message,"
said March.

"Why not?"

" Why, for one thing, I don't agree with you that
it's all right. Your choosing to stand by the conse-
quences of Bumamy's wrong doesn't undo it As I
understand, you don't pardon it — "

Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Then
he said, " I stand by what I done. I'm not going to
let him say I turned him down for doing what I told
him to, because I hadn't the sense to know what T was
about."

" Ah, I don't think it's a thing he'll like to speak of
in any case," said March.

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StoUer left him, at the comer they had reached, as
abruptly as he had joined him, and March hurried
back to his wife, and told her what had just passed be-
tween him and Stoller.

She broke out, " Well, I am surprised at you, my
dear! You have always accused me of suspecting
people, and attributing bad motives; and here youVe
refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the
doubt. He merely wanted to save his savage pride
with you, and that's all he wants to do with Bumamy.
How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stoller
doesn't blame him? Why should you refuse to give
his message to Bumamy? I don't want you to ridi-
cule me for my conscience any more, Basil; you're
twice as bad as I ever was. Don't you think that a
person can ever expiate an oflFence? I've often heard
you say that if any one owned his fault he put it
from him, and it was the same as if it hadn't been;
and hasn't Bumamy owned up over and over again ?
I'm astonished at you, dearest"

March was, in fact, somewhat astonished at himself
in the light of her reasoning; but she went on with
some sophistries that restored him to his self -right-
eousness.

" I suppose you think he has interfered with Stol-
ler's political ambition, and injured him in that way.
Well, what if he has? Would it be a good thing to
have a man like that succeed in politics? You're al-
ways saying that the low character of our politicians
is the ruin of the country; and I'm sure," she added,
with a prodigious leap over all the sequences, "that
Mr. Stoller is acting nohly; and it's your duty to help
him relieve Bumamy's mind." At the laugh he broke
into she hastened to say, " Or if you won't, I hope you'll
not object to my doing so, for I shall, anywajV^

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She rose as if she were going to b^n at once, in
spite of his laughing; and, in fact, she had already a
plan for coming to StoUer's assistance by getting at
Bnmamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspected
of knowing where he was. There had been no chance
for them to speak of him either that morning or the
evening before, and after a great deal of controversy
with herself in her husband's presence she decided to
wait till they came naturally together the next morn-
ing for the walk to the Capuchin Church on the hill
beyond the river, which they had agreed to take. She
could not keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoe
begging her to be sure to come, and hinting that she
had something very important to speak of.

She was not sure but she had been rather silly to
do this, but when they met the girl confessed that she
had thought of giving up the walk, and might not
have come except for Mrs. March's note. She had
came with Rose, and had left him below with March;
Mrs. Adding was coming later with Kenby and Gen-
eral Triscoe.

Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great
news; and if she had been in doubt before of the
girl's feeling for Bumamy she was now in none. She
had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and
then the pain, which was also a pleasure, of seeing her
blanch with dismay.

'' I don't know where he is, Mrs. March. I haven't
heard a word from his since that night in Carlsbad,
I expected — I didn't know but you — "

Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the fact
skilfully as something to be regretted simply because
it would be such a relief to Bumamy to know how
Mr. Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach
him somehow; you could alwavs get letters to people

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in Europe in tlie end; and, in fact, it was altogether
probable that he was that very instant in Wiirzbtirg;
for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him
to write np the Wagner operas, it would certainly want
him to write up the mana?uvres. She established his
presence in Wiirzburg by such an irrefragable chain
of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was just
able to keep back a scream, while she ran to open
the door. It was not Bumamy, as in compliance with
every nerve it ought to have been, but her husband^
who tried to justify his presence by saying that they
were all waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked
when they were coming.

She frowned him silent, and then shut herself out-
side with him long enough to whisper, " Say she's got
a headache, or anything you please; but don't stop
talking here with me or I shall go wild." She then,
shut herself in again, with the effect of holding him
accountable for the whole affair.

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XIV

Geneeal Teiscoe could not keep his irritation, at
hearing that his daughter was not coming, out of tho
excuses he made to Mrs. Adding; he said again and
again that it must seem like a discourtesy to her. She
gayly disclaimed any such notion ; she would not hear
of putting off their excursion to another day; it had
been raining just long enough to give them a reason-
able hope of a few hours^ drought, and they might
not have another dry spell for weeks. She slipped
off her jacket after they started and gave it to Kenby,
but she let General Triscoe hold her imibrella over
her while he limped beside her. She seemed to March
as he followed with Rose, to be playing the two men
off against each other, with an ease which he wished
his wife could be there to see, and to judge aright.

They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the
earliest years of the seventh century, between rows of
saints whose statues surmount the piers. Some are
bishops as well as saints ; one must have been at Rome
in his day, for he wore his long, thick beard in the
fashion of Michelangelo's Moses. He stretched out
toward the passers two fingers of blessing and was
unaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them
and was giving him the effect of offering it to the
public admiration. Squads of soldiers tramping by
turned to look and smile, and the dull faces of citi-
zens lighted up at the quaint sight. Some children
stopped and remained very quiet, not to scare away

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the bird; and a cold -faced, spiritual - looking priest
paused among them as if doubting whether to rescue
the absent-minded bishop from a situation derogatory
to his dignity; but he passed on, and then the spar-
row suddenly flew off.

Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with.
March, but they now pushed on and came up with
the others at the end of the bridge, where they found
them in question whether they had not better take a
carriage and drive to the foot of the hill before they
began their climb. March thanked them, but said he
was keeping up the terms of his cure, and was getting
in all the walking he could. Rose begged his mother
not to include him in the driving party; he protested
that he was feeling so well, and the walk was doing
him good. His mother consented, if he would prom-
ise not to get tired, and then she mounted into the
two-spanner which had driven instinctively up to their
party when their parley began, and General Triscoe
took the place beside her, while Kenby, with smiling
patience, seated himself in front.

Rose kept on talking with March about Wiirzburg
and its history, which it seemed he had been read-
ing the night before when he could not sleep. He
explained, "We get little histories of the places
wherever we go. That's what Mr. Kenby does, you
know."

" Oh yes," said March.

" I don't suppose I shall get a chance to read much
here," Rose continued, "with General Triscoe in the
room. He doesn't like the light."

" Well, well. He's rather old, you know. And you
mustn't read too much. Rose. It isn't good for you."

" I know, but if I don't read I think, and that keeps
me awake worse. Of course, I respect General Triscoe

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for being in the war and getting wounded," the boy
suggested.

" A good many did it," March was tempted to say.

The boy did not notice his insinuation. " I sup-
pose there were some things they did in the army, and
then they couldnH get over the habit But General
Grant says in his Life that he never used a profane
expletive."

" Does General Triscoe ?"

Rose answered, reluctantly : " If anything wakes hira
in the night, or if he can't make these Gkrman beds
over to suit him — "

" I see." March turned his face to hide the smile
which he would not have let the boy detect. He
thought best not to let Rose resume his impressions
of the general ; and in talk of weightier matters they
found themselves at that point of the climb where the
carriage was waiting for them. From this point they
followed an alley through ivied garden walls, till they
reached the first of the balustraded terraces which
ascend to the crest of the hill where the church stands.
Each terrace is planted with sycamores, and the face
of the terrace wall supports a bas-relief commemorat-
ing with the drama of its life-size figures the stations
of the cross.

Monks and priests were coming and going, and
dropped on the steps leading from terrace to terrace
were women and children on their knees in prayer.
It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other
Catholic lands ; but here there was a touch of earnest
in the Northern face of the worshippers which the
South had never imparted. Even in the beautiful
rococo interior of the church at the top of the hill
there was a sense of something deeper and truer than
mere ecclesiasticism ; and March came out of it in a

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serious muse which the boy at his side did nothing to
interrupt. A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed
silently out over the prospect of river and city and
vineyard, purpling together below the top where he
stood, and mixed with this regret was a vague resent-
ment of his wife's absence. She ought to have been
there to share his pang and his pleasure; they had so
long enjoyed everything together that without her he
felt unable to get out of either emotion all there was
m it.

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces
after the rest of the party who had left him behind
with March. At the last terrace they stopped and
waited; and after a delay that began to be long to
Mrs. Adding, she wondered aloud what could have
become of them.

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and
she consented in seeming to refuse. '*It isn't worth
while. Rose has probably got Mr. March into some
deep discussion, and they've forgotten all about us.
But if you will go, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind
Rose of my existence." She let him lay her jacket
on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat
down on one of the steps which Gteneral Triscoe kept
striking with the point of her umbrella as he stood
before her.

" I really shall have to take it from you if you do
that any more," she said, laughing up in his face.
^^ I'm serious."

He stopped. " I wish I could believe you were seri-
ous for a moment."

" You may if you think it will do you any good.
But I don't see why."

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous
eagerness which might have been pathetic to any one

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who liked him. "Do you know this is almost the
first time I have spoken alone with you V^

"Really, I hadn't noticed," said Mrs. Adding.

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way.
"^'Well, that's encouraging, at least, to a man who's
had his doubt whether it wasn't intended."

" Intended ? By whom ? What do you mean, Gen-
eral Triscoe? Why in the world shouldn't you have
spoken alone with me before ?"

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say,
and while she smiled pleasantly she had the look in
her eyes of being brought to bay and being prepared,
if it must come to that, to Jiave the worst over then
and there. She was not half his age, but he was
aware of her having no respect for his years; com-
pared with her average American past as he under-
stood it, his social place was much higher, but she
was not in the least awed by it; in spite of his war
record, she was making him behave like a coward. He
was in a false position, and if he had any one but
himself to blame he had not her. He read her equal
knowledge of these facts in the clear eyes that made
him flush and turn his own away.

Then he started with a quick " Hello !" and stood
staring up at the steps from the terrace above, where
Rose Adding was staying himself weakly by a clutch
of Kenby on one side and March on the other.

His mother looked round and caught herself up from
where she sat and ran toward him. " Oh, Rose !"

" It's nothing, mother," he called to her, and as she
dropped on her knees before him he sank limply against
her. " It was like what I had in Carlsbad ; that's all.
Don't worry about me, please!"

" I'm not worrying. Rose," she said, with courage
of the same texture as his own. " You've been walk-

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ing too much. You must go back in the carriage with'
us. Can't you have it come here ?" she asked Kenby,

" There's no road, Mrs. Adding. But if Rose would
let me carry him — ^"

" I can walk," the boy protested, trying to lift him-
self from her neck.

"No, nol you mustn't." She drew away and let
him fall into the arms that Kenby put round him.
He raised the frail burden lightly to his shoulder and
moved strongly away, followed by the eyes of the spec-
tators who had gathered about the little group, but who
dispersed now and went back to their devotions.

March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom
he told he had just missed Rose and was looking about
for him, when Kenby came with her message for them.
They made sure that he was nowhere about the church,
and then started together down the terraces. At the
second or third station below they found the boy cling-
ing to the barrier that protected the bas-relief from tho
zeal of the devotees. He looked white and sick, though
he insisted that he was well, and when he turned to
come away with them he reeled and would have fallen
if Kenby had not caught him. Kenby wanted to carry
him, but Rose would not let him, and had made his way
down between them.

" Yes, he has such a spirit," she said, " and IVe no
doubt he's suffering now more from Mr. Kenby's kind-
ness than from his own sickness. He had one of these
giddy turns in Carlsbad, though, and I shall certainly
have a doctor to see him."

" I think I should, Mrs. Adding," said March, not
too gravely, for it seemed to him that it was not quite
his business to alarm her further, if she was herself
taking the affair with that seriousness. He questioned
whether she was taking it quite seriously enough, when

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she turned with a laugh and called to General Triscoe,
who was limping down the steps of the last terrace he-
hind them:

"Oh, poor General Triscoe! I thought you had
gone on ahead/'

General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of
being forgotten, apparently. He assisted with gravity
at the disposition of the party for the return when
they all reached the carriage. Rose had the place
beside his mother, and Kenby wished ^farch to take
his with the general and let him sit with the driver;
but he insisted that he would rather walk home, and
he did walk till they had driven out of sight Then
he called a passing one-spanner, and drove to his hotel
in comfort and silence.

Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper;
then he reported that the doctor had said Rose was
on the verge of a nervous collapse. He had over-
worked at school, but the immediate trouble was the
high, thin air, which the doctor said he must be got
out of at once into a quiet place at the sea-shore some-
where. He had suggested Ostend, or some i)oint on the
French coast: Kenby had thought of Scheveningen,
and the doctor had said that would do admirably.

"I understood from Mrs. Adding," he concluded,
"that you were going there for your after-cure, Mr.
March, and I didn't know but you might be going
soon."

At the mention of Scheveningen the Marches had
looked at each other with a guilty alarm, which they
both tried to give the cast of affectionate sympathy;
but she dismissed her fear that he might be going to
let his compassion prevail with him to his hurt when
he said: "Why, we ought to have been there before
this, but IVe been takinsr mv life in my hands in try-

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ing to see a little of Germany, and I'm afraid now
that Mrs. March has her mind too firmly fixed on
Berlin to let me think of going to Scheveningen till
weVe been there."

" It's too bad I" said Mrs. March, with real regret
" I wish we were going/' But she had not the least
notion of gratifying her wish; and they were all si-
lent till Kenby broke out :

" Look here t You know how I feel about Mrs. Add-
ing! I've been pretty frank with Mr. March myself,
and I've had my suspicions that she's been frank with
you, Mrs. March. There isn't any doubt about my
wanting to marry her, and up to this time there hasn't
been any doubt about her not wanting to marry me.
But it isn't a question of her or of me now. It's a
question of Rose. I love the boy," and Kenby's voice
shook, and he faltered a moment. " Pshaw ! You un-
derstand."

" Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby," said Mrs. March. " I
perfectly tmderstand you."

"Well, I don't think Mrs. Adding is fit to make
the journey with him alone, or to place herself in the
test way after she gets to Scheveningen. She's been
badly shaken up; she broke down before the doctors;
she said she didn't know what to do; I suppose she's
frightened — "

Kenby stopped again, and March asked, " When is
she going ?"

" To-morrow," said Kenby, and he added, " And
now the question is, why shouldn't I go with her?"

Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her
husband, but he said nothing, and Kenby seemed not
to have supposed that he would say anything.

"I know it would be very American and all that,
but I happen to be an American, and it wouldn't be

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out of character for me. I suppose," he appealed to
Mrs. March, " that it's something I might offer to do
if it were from New York to Florida — and I happened
to be going there? And I did happen to be going to
Hollani"

" Why, of course, Mr. Kenby," she responded, with
such solemnity that March gave way in an outrageous
laugh.

Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed, too, but
with an inner note of protest.

"Well," Kenby continued, still addressing her,
" what I want you to do is to stand by me when I
propose it."

Mrs. March gathered strength to say, "No, Mr.
Kenby, it's your own aifair, and you must take the
responsibility."

" Do you disapprove ?"

" It isn't the same as it would be at home. You
see that yourself."

" Well," said Kenby, rising, " I have to arrange
about their getting away to-morrow. It won't be easy
in this hurly-burly that's coming off."

" Give Rose our love ; and tell Mrs. Adding that I'll
come round and see her to-morrow before she starts."

" Oh ! I'm afraid you can't, Mrs. Mlarch. They're
to start at six in the morning."

" They are I Then we must go and see them to-
night. We'll be there almost as soon as you are."

March went up to their rooms with his wife, and
she began on the stairs :

" Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laugh-
ing so gave us completely away. And what vms there
to keep grinning about, all through ?"

"Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical pas-
sion of love. It's always tJie most amusing thing in

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the world; but to see it trying to pass itself off in
poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinter-
ested affection for Rose, was more than I could stand.
I don't apologize for laughing; I wanted to yell."

His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to
save him; and she said from the point where he had
side-tracked her mind : " I don't call it disingenuous.
He was brutally frank. He's made it impossible to
treat the affair with dignity. I want you to leave the
whole thing to me from this out. Jfow, will you f"

On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged
in her own mind for Mrs. Adding to get a maid, and
for the doctor to send an assistant with her on the
journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme
that she had not the courage to right herself when
Mrs. Adding met her with the appeal :

" Oh, Mrs. March, I'm so glad you approve of Mr.
Kenby's plan. It does seem the only thing to do. I
can't trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr. Kenby's
intending to go to Scheveningen a few days later, any-
way. Though it's too bad to let him give up the ma-
noeuvres."

" I'm sure he won't mind that," Mrs. March's voice
said, mechanically, while her thought was busy with
the question whetiier this scandalous duplicity was al-
together Kenby's, and whether Mrs. Adding was as
guiltless of any share in it as she looked. She looked
pitifully distracted; she might not have understood
his report ; or Kenby might really have mistaken Mrs.
March's sympathy for favor.

"No, he only lives to do good," Mrs. Adding re-
turned. " He's with Rose ; won't you come in and see
them?"

Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from
which they would not let him get up. He was full of

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the trip to Holland, and had already pushed Kenby,
as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very gen-
eral knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose
had plans for taking up after they were settled in
Scheveningen. The boy scoffed at the notion that he
was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with
March on the points where he had found Kenby
wanting.

" Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose,*'
the editor protested, and he amplified his ignorance for
the boy's good to an extent which Rose saw was a joke.
He left Holland to talk about other things which his
mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to
know if March did not think that the statue of the
bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a subject
for a poem ; and March said, gayly, that if Rose would
write it he would print it in Every Other Weeh

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. ** No,
I couldn't do it. But I wish Mr. Bumamy had seen
it. He could. Will you tell him about it ?" He want-
ed to know if March had heard from Bumamy lately,
and in the midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary
sigh.^

His mother said that now he had talked enough,
and bade him say good-bye to the Marches, who were
coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March put
her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him
sink back her eyes were dim.

" You see how frail he is !'' said Mrs. Adding. " I
shall not let him out of my sight, after this, till he's
well again."

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away
with them which was not lost upon the witnesses. He
asked them to come into the reading-room a moment
with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going

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to make some excuse to her for himself; but he said:
" I don't know how we're to manage about the Tris-
coes. The general will have a room to himself, but if
Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her it leaves Miss
Triseoe out, and there isn't a room to be had in this
house or love or money. Do you think," he appealed
directly to Mrs. March, " that it would do to offer her
my room at the Swan ?"

" Why, yes," she assented, with a reluctance ratlier
for the complicity in which he had already involved
her, and for which he was still unpimished, than for
what he was now proposing. ^' Or she could come in
with me, and Mr. March could take it."

"Whichever you think," said Kenby so submissive-
ly that she relented, to ask:

" And what will you do?"

He laughed. "Well, people have been known to
sleep in a chair. I shall manage somehow."

" You might offer to go in with the general,'' March
suggested, and the men apparently thought this was
a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her feminine
worry about ways and means.

" Where is Miss Triseoe ?" she asked. '* We haven't
seen them."

"Didn't Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to
supper at a restaurant; the general doesn't like the
cooking here. They ought to have been back before
this."

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said,
" I suppose you would like us to wait."

" It would be very kind of you."

" Oh, it's quite essential," she returned, with an airy
freshness which Kenby did not seem to feel as pain-
fully as he ought.

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a

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few minutesy and a cloud on the general's face lifted
at the proposition Kenby left Mr. March to make.

" I thought that child ought to be in his mother's
charge," he said. With his own comfort provided
for, he made no objections to Mrs. March's plan; and
Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother.
" By-the-way," the general tnmed to March, " I found
Stoller at the restaurant where we supped. He offered
me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres. How
are you going?"

" I think I shall go by train. I don't fancy the long
drive."

" Well, I don't know that it's worse than the long
walk after you leave the train," said the general from
the offence which any diflference of taste was apt to
give him. " Are you going by train, too ?" he asked
Kenby, with indifference.

" I'm not going at all," said Kenby. " I'm leaving
Wiirzburg in the morning."

" Oh, indeed," said the general.

Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew
that Kenby was going with Rose and Mrs. Adding,
but she felt that there must be a full and open recog-
nition of the fact among them. "Yes," she said,
" isn't it fortunate that Mr. Kenby should be going to
Holland, too! I should have been so unhappy about
them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that
long journey with poor little Rose alone."

" Yes, yes ; very fortunate, certainly," said the gen-
eral, colorlessly.

Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appre-
ciation; but Kenby was too simply, too densely con-
tent with the situation to know the value of what she
had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as
he walked back with her to the Swan, whether he

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had misrepresented her to Mrs. Adding or Mrs. Add-
ing had misundei^stood him. Somewhere there had
been an error, or a duplicity which it was now useless
to punish; and Kenby was so apparently unconscious
of it that she had not the heart to be cross with hinu
She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laugh-
ing in the gayety which the escape from her father
seemed to inspire in her. She was promising March
to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor
and Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he
was warning her that if she laughed there, like that,
she would subject him to fine and imprisonment. She
pretended that she would like to see him led off be-
tween two gendarmes, but consented to be a little care-
ful when he asked her how she expected to get back to
her hotel without him, if such a thing happened.

After all. Miss Triscoe did not go with March ; she
preferred to sleep. The imperial party was to arrive
at half-past seven, but at six the crowd was already
dense before the station, and all along the street lead-
ing to the Eesidenz. It was a brilliant day, with the
promise of sunshine, through which a chilly wind blew,
for the manoeuvres. The colors of all the German
states flapped in this breeze from the poles wreathed
with evergreen which encircled the square; the work-
men putting the last touches on the bronzed allegory
hurried madly to be done, and they had scarcely fin-
ished their labors when two troops of dragoons rode
into the place and formed before the station, and waited
as motionlessly as their horses would allow.

These animals were not so conscious as lions at the
approach of princess; they tossed and stamped impa-
tiently in the long interval before the Regent and his
daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests. All the
human beings, both those who were in charge and those

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who were under charge, were in a quiver of anxiety to
play their parts well, as if there were some heavy pen-
alty for failure in the least point. The policemen keep-
ing the people in line behind the ropes which restrained
them trembled with eagerness ; the faces of some of the
troopers twitched. An involuntary sigh went up from
the crowd as the Eegent^s carriage appeared, heralded
by outriders, and followed by other plain carriages of
Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver. Then
the whistle of the Kaiser's train sounded ; a trumpeter
advanced and began to blow his trumpet as they do in
the theatre; and exactly at the appointed moment the
Emperor and Empress came out of the station through
the brilliant human alley lending from it, mounted
their carriages, with the stage trumpeter always blow-
ing, and whirled swiftly round half the square and
flashed into the comer toward the Residenz out of
sight. The same hollow groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted
and followed them from the spectators as had wel-
comed the Regent when he first arrived among his fel-
low-townsmen, with the same effect of being the con-
ventional cries of a stage mob behind the scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable
pictures, with a swarthy face from which his blue eyes
glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored if not
good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath
her deeply fringed white parasol, and they both bowed
right and left in acknowledgment of those hollow
groans; but again it seemed to March that sovereignty
gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, 9
scantier return than it merited. lie had perhaps been
insensibly working toward some such perception as
now came to him that the great difference between
Europe and America was that in Europe life is his-
trionic and dramatized, and that in America, except

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when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sin-
cere. He wondered whether the innate conviction of
equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common hu-
manity transcending all social and civic pretences, was
what gave their theatrical effect to the shows of defer-
ence from low to high, and of condescension from high
to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and sub-
jects the prince did not play his part so well as the
people, it might be that he had a harder part to play,
and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from be-
ing found out the sham that he essentially was, he had
to hurry across the stage amid the distracting thunders
of the orchestra. If the star stayed to be scrutinized
by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor
supernumeraries and scene-shifters, might see that he
was a tallow candle like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that
he had waited an hour and a half for half a minute's
glimpse of the imperial party, March now decided not
to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected
to still greater humiliation and disappointment. He
had certainly come to Wiirzburg for the manoeuvres,
but Wiirzburg had been richly repaying in itself; and
why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded
train, and struggle for three miles on foot against that
harsh wind, to see a multitude of men give proofs of
their fitness to do manifold murder ? He was, in fact,
not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing
that really troubled him was the question of how he
should justify his recreance to his wife. This did
alloy the pleasure with which he began, after an excel-
lent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about the
streets, though he had them almost to himself, so many
citizens had followed the soldiers to the manoeuvres.

It was not till the soldiers began returning from

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the manoeuvres, dusty-footed, and in white canvas over-
alls drawn over their trousers to save them, that he
went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the
Swan. He had given them time enough to imagine
him at the review, and to wonder whether he had seen
General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they met
him with such confident inquiries that he would not
undeceive them at once. He let them divine from
his inventive answers that he had not gone to the
manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with
themselves, and the girl said it was so cold and rough
that she wished her father had not gone, either. The
general appeared just before dinner and frankly avow-
ed the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from
the dust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and
red, and he was too angry with the company he had
been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He
referred to the military chiefly in relation to the Miss
Stollers^ inefl^ectual flirtations, which he declared had
been outrageous. Their father had apparently no con-
trol over them whatever, or else was too ignorant to
know that they were misbehaving. They were without
respect or reverence for any one; they had talked to
General Triscoe as if he were a boy of their own age,
or a dotard whom nobody need mind; they had not
only kept up their foolish babble before him, they had
laughed and giggled, they had broken into snatches of
American song, they had all but whistled and danced.
They made loud comments in Illinois English on the
cuteness of the officers whom they admired, and they
had at one time actually got out their handkerchiefs.
He supposed they meant to wave them at the officers,
but at the look he gave them they merely put their hats
together and snickered in derision of him. They were
American girls of the worst type; they conformed to

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no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal.
They ought to be taken home.

Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she
agreed with him that they were altogether unformed,
and were the effect of their own ignorant caprices.
Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by
taking them away.

'"It would hide them, at any rate,'^ he answered.
" They would sink back into the great mass of our
vulgarity and not be noticed. We behave like a parcel
of peasants with our women. We think that if no
harm is meant or thought, we may risk any sort of
appearance, and we do things that are scandalously
improper simply because they are innocent. That may
be all very well at home, but people who prefer that
sort of thing had better stay there, where our peasant
manners wonH make them conspicuous."

As their train ran northward out of Wiirzburg that
afternoon, Mrs. March recurred to the general's clos-
ing words. " That was a slap at Mrs. Adding for let-
ting Kenby go oflF with her."

She took up the history of the past twenty -four
hours, from the time March had left her with Miss
Triscoe when he went with her father and the Add-
ings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no
chance to bring up these arrears imtil now, and she
atoned to herself for the delay by making the history
very full, and going back and adding touches at any
I)oint where she thought she had scanted it. After
all, it consisted mainly of frajo^mentary intimations
from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered questions whicH
her own art now built into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much re-
sented Bumamy's clandestine visit to Carlsbad when
his daughter told him of it, or that he had done more

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than make her promise that she would not keep np
the acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

" Probably," Mrs. March said, " as long as he had
any hopes of Mrs. Adding, he was a little too self-
conscious to be very up and down about Bumamy."

" Then you think he was really serious about her V^

" Now, my dear ! He was so serious that I suppose
he was never so completely taken aback in his life as
when he met Kenby in Wiirzburg and saw how she
received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight."

"The fight r

" Yes — ^that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping
up to prevent his offering himself."

" Oh ! And how do you know that they were keep-
ing up the fight together ?"

" How do I ? Didn't you see yourself what friends
they were? Did you tell him what Stoller had said
about Bumamy ?"

" I had no chance. I didn't know that I should have
done it, anyway. It wasn't my affair."

" Well, then, I think you might. It would have
been everything for that poor child; it would have
completely justified her in her own eyes."

" Perhaps your telling her will serve the same pur-
pose."

" Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it She had a
right to know it."

"Did she think Stoller's willingness to overlook
Bumamy's performance had anything to do with its
moral quality?"

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she
said, " I told her you thought that if a person owned
to a fault they disowned it and put it away from them
just as if it had never been committed ; and that if a
person had taken their punishment for a wrong they

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had done, they had expiated it so far as anybody else
was concerned. And hasn^t poor Biimamy done both ?*'

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with
his own- petard, but as a husband he was not going to
come down at once. " I thought probably yon had
told her that. You had it pat from having just been
over it with me. When has she heard from him ?"

"Why, that^s the strangest thing about it. She
hasn^t heard at all. She doesn't know where he is.
She thought we must know. She was terribly broken
up.'*

" How did she show it V

" She didn't show it. Either you want to tease, or
youVe forgotten how such things are with young peo-
ple— or at least girls."

" Yes, it's all a long time ago with me, and I never
was a girl. Besides, the frank and direct behavior of
Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very obliterating to
my early impressions of love-making."

" It certainly hasn't been ideal," said Mrs. March,
with a sigh.

" Why hasn't it been ideal ?" he asked. " Kenby
is tremendously in love with her; and I believe she's
had a fancy for him from the beginning. If it hadn't
been for Rose she would have accepted him at once;
and now he's essential to them both in their helpless-
ness. As for Papa Triscoe and his Europeanized
scruples, if they have any reality at all they're the
residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and
Mrs. Adding have nothing to do with their unreality.
His being in love with her is no reason why he shouldn't
be helpful to her when she needs him, and every reason
why he should. I call it a poem, such as very few peo-
ple have the luck to live out together."

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when

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he stopped she cried out, " Well, my dear, I do believe
you are right! It is ideal, as you say; it's a perfect
poem. And I shall always say — '^

She stopped at the mocking light which she caught
in his look, and perceived that he had been amusing
himself with her perennial enthusiasm for all sorts of
love - affairs. But she averred that she did not care ;
what he had said was true, and she should always hold
him to it.

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment
in which they had left Carlsbad, when they found
themselves alone together after their escape from the
pressure of others* interests. The tide of travel was
toward Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take
place some days later. They were going to Weimar,
which was so few hours out of their way that they
simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old
literary capital they were alone in their compartment,
with not even a stranger, much less a friend, to molest
them. The flying landscape without was of their
own early autiminal mood, and when the vineyards of
Wiirzburg ceased to purple it, the heavy aftermath of
hay and clover, which men, women, and children were
loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows
everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change. It
was always the German landscape; sometimes flat and
fertile, sometimes hilly and poor; often clothed with
dense woods, but always charming, ^vith castled tops
in ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages
drowsed within their walls, and dreamed of the medi-
aeval past, silent, without apparent life, except for some
little goose-girl driving her flock before her as she sal-
lied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh
pasturage.

As their train mounted among the Thuringian up-

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lands they were aware of a finer, cooler air throtigli
their open windows. The torrents foamed white out
of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along
the valleys, where the hamlets roused themselves in
momentary curiosity as the train roared into them
from the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshine had
the glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and tlie
travellers had a pleasant bewilderment in which their
memories of Switzerland and the White Mountains
mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack
sojourns. They chose this place and that in the lovely
region where they lamented that they had not come
at once for the after-cure, and they appointed enough
returns to it in future years to consume all the sum-
mers they had left to live.

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It was falling night when they reached Weimar,
where they found at the station a provision of omni-
buses far beyond the hotel accommodations. They
drove first to the Crown-Prince, which was in a prom-
ising state of reparation, but which for the present
could only welcome them to an apartment where a
canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plastered
wall. The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospit-
ably out to try and place them at the Elephant. But
the Elephant was full, and the Russian Court was full,
too. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethought
himself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but
very nice, where they might get rooms, and after the
delay of an hour they got a carriage and drove away
from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord continued
to the last as benevolent as if they had been a profit
instead of a loss to him.

The streets of the town at nine o'clock were empty
and quiet, and they instantly felt the academic quality
of the place. Through the pale night they could see
that the architecture was of the classic sentiment which
they were destined to feel more and more ; at one point
they caught a fleeting glimpse of two figures with clasp-
ed hands and half embraced, which they knew for the
statues of Goethe and Schiller ; and when they mounted
to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they
passed under a fresco representing Goethe and four
other world-famous poets — Shakspere, Milton, Tasso,

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and Schiller. The poets all looked like OermanSy as
was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them ;
he marshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller
brought up the rear and kept them from going astray
in an Elysium where they did not speak the language.
For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite Amer-
ican freshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as
of straw matting and provided with steam - radiators.
In the sense of its homeUkeness the Marches boasted
that they were never going away from it.

In the morning they discovered that their windows
looked out on the grand - ducal museum, with a gar-
dened space before and below its classicistic bulk,
where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers were
full of sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it un-
awares, March strolled up through the town ; but Wei-
mar was as much awake at that hour as at any of
the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets,
where he encountered a few passers several blocks
apart, was their habitual mood. He came promptly
upon two objects which he would willingly have
shunned: a denkmal of the Franco-German war, not
so furiously bad as most German monuments, but anti-
pathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monuments
are; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from
this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-
and-dog teams for some time, and he wondered by what
civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so con-
trolled that they should have abounded in Hamburg,
Leipsic, and Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nurem-
berg, Ansbach, and Wiirzburg, to reappear again in
Weimar, though they seemed as characteristic of all
Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over
France.

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had

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glimpsed the night before was characteristic, too, but
less offensively so. Q^rman statues at the best are con-
scious ; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them,
have the air of showily confronting posterity with their
clasped hands, and of being only partially rapt from
the spectators. But they were more imconscious than
any other German statues that March had seen, and
he quelled a desire to ask Groethe, as he stood with his
hand on Schiller's shoulder and looked serenely into
space far above one of the typical equipages of his
country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But
upon reflection he did not know why Goethe should be
held personally responsible for the existence of the
woman-and-dog team. He felt that he might more rea-
sonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic
profiles which he began to note in the Weimar popu-
lace. This could be a sympathetic effect of that passion
for the antique which the poet brought back with him
from his sojourn in Italy ; though, many of the people,
especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the
antique had begun in their faces, and had not yet got
down to their legs; in any case they were charming
children, and as a test of their culture he had a mind
to ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue
of Herder was, which he thought he might as well take
in on his ramble and so be done with as many statues
as he could. She answered with a pretty regret in her
tender voice, " That I truly cannot," and he was more
satisfied than if she could, for he thought it better to
be a child and honest than to know where any German
statue was.

He easily foimd it for himself in the place which is
called the Herder Platz after it. He went into the
Peter and Paul Church there, where Herder used to

j)reach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the no-
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bility and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; tHe
sovereign was shielded from the worst effects of his
doctrine by worshipping apart from other sinners in
a glazed gallery. Herder is buried in the church, and
when you ask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-
door in the pavement, and you think you are going
down into the crypt, but you are only to see Herder's
monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save it
from passing feet. Here also is the greatest picture
of that great soul Luke Kranach, who had sincerity
enough in his painting to atone for all the swelling
German sculptures in the world. It is a crucifixion,
and the cross is of a white birch log, such as might have
been cut out of the Weimar woods, shaved smooth on
the sides, with the bark showing at the edges. Kranach
has put himself among the spectators, and a stream of
blood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon
the painter's head. He is in the company of John the
Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther stands with his
Bible open and his finger on the line, " The blood of
Jesus cleanseth us."

Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things
without his wife, and partly because he was now very
hungry, March turned from them and got back to his
hotel, where she was looking out for him from their
open window. She had the air of being long domesti-
cated there, as she laughed down at seeing him come ;
and the continued brilliancy of the weather added to
the illusion of home.

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America ;
the sun in that gardened hollow before the museum
was already hot enough to make him glad of the shelter
of the hotel. The summer seemed to have come back
to oblige them, and when they learned that they were
to see Weimar in a festive mood because this was Sedan

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Day, their curiosity, if not their sympathy, accepted the
chance gratefully. But they were almost moved to wish
that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that
all the public carriages were engaged, and they must
have one from a stable if they wished to drive after
breakfast. Still, it was offered them for such a modest
number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly
and conversable, that they assented to the course of his-
tory, and were more and more reconciled as they bowled
along through the grand-ducal park beside the waters
of the classic Hm.

The waters of the classic Dm are sluggish and slimy
in places, and in places clear and brooklike, but always
a dull dark green in color. They flow in the shadow
of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows,
where the aftermath wanders in heavy windrows, and
the children sport joyously over the smooth-mown sur-
faces in all the freedom that there is in Germany. At
last, after immemorial appropriation, the owners of the
earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come
into the pleasure if not the profit of it. At last the
prince, the knight, the noble finds, as in his turn the
plutocrat will find, that his property is not for him, but
for all ; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes
from it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks,
pleasaunces, gardens, set apart for kings, are the play-
grounds of the landless poor in the Old World, and
perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-
sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child
bom to the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look
down from their palace windows upon the leisure of
overwork taking its little holiday amid beauty vainly
created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar,
where sovereignty had graced and ennobled itself as

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nowhere else in the world by the companionship of
letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying first
to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily
making it second to the cottage of a poet. But, in
fact, it is Goethe who is forever the prince in Weimar,
His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the
city; the thought of him is its chief est invitation and
largest hospitality.

The travellers remembered, above all other facts
of the grand-ducal park, that it was there he first
met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young, when
he, too, was beautiful and young, and took her home
to be his love, to the just and lasting displeasure of
Frau von Stein, who was even less reconciled when,
after eighteen years of due reflection, the love of Goethe
and Christiane became their marriage. They wondered
just where it was he saw the young girl coming to meet
him as the Grand-Duke^s minister with an office-seek-
ing petition from her brother, Goethe's brother author,
long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of
Rinaldo Rinaldini. They had, indeed, no great mind,
in their American respectability, for that rather mat-
ter-of-fact and deliberate Ivdson, and little as their
sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue
with the Frau von Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment
about the Goethe cottage to suppose that there his love-
life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resented
the fact, and when she learned later that it was not
the fact at all, she removed it from her associations
with the pretty place almost indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces, we
Americans are worshippers of marriage, and if a great
poet, the minister of a prince, is going to marry a
poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their
son is almost of age. Mrs. ^farch would not accept as

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extenuating circumstances the Grand-Duke's godfather-
hood, or Goethe's open constancy to Christiane, or the
tardy consecration of their union after the French sack
of Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him
from the rudeness of the marauding soldiers. For her
!N^ew England soul there were no degrees in such guilt,
and perhaps there are really not so many as people
have tried to think in their deference to Goethe's great-
ness. But certainly the affair was not so simple for a
grand -ducal minister of world-wide renown, and ho
might well have felt its difficulties, for he could not
have been proof against the censorious public opinion
of Weimar, or the yet more censorious private opinion
of Frau von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of
these old dead embarrassments lingered within or with-
out the Goethe garden-house. The trees which the poet
himself planted flimg a sun-shot shadow upon it, and
about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from
which the sweet lame girl, who limped through the
rooms and showed them, gathered a parting nosegay
for her visitors. The few small living-rooms were
above the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below
in the Italian fashion; in one of the little chambers
was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with him on
his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at
the front stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair
before it from which he might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the great
man gone than the proud little palace in the town,
which so aboimds with relics and memorials of him.
His library, his study, his study-table, with everything
on it just as he left it when

"Cadde la stanca man,"
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are there, and there is the death-chair facing the win-
dow, from which he gasped for " more light '* at last.
The handsome, well-arranged rooms are full of souve-
nirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which
he did so much to impart to all German hearts, and
whose modem waning leaves its records here of an
interest pathetically, almost amusingly, faded. Thej
intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended
more and more, and amid the multitude of sculptures,
pictures, prints, drawings, gems, medals, autographs,
there is the sense of the many-mindedness, the univer-
sal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but
not in his contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less
keenly personal, less intimate than the simple garden-
house, or else, with the great troop of people going
through it, and the custodians lecturing in various
voices and languages to the attendant groups, the
Marches had it less to themselves and so imagined
him less in it.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivable-
ness which is common to them everywhere, and very
probably if one could meet their proprietors in them
one would as little remember them apart afterward
as the palaces themselves. It will not do to lift either
houses or men far out of the average; they become
spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to
have character, which belongs to the levels of life, where
alone there are ease and comfort, and himian nature
may be itself, with all the little delightful differences
repressed in those who represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-
ducal Eesidenz at Weimar, March felt everywhere the
strong wish of the prince who was Goethe^s friend to
ally himself with literature, and to be human at least
in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion

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ifor poets; his mother had kno\vii it in her time, and
Weimar was the home of Wieland and of Herder be-
fore the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels
bringing Goethe with him, and afterward attracting
Schiller. The story of that great epoch is all there
in the Residenz, told as articulately as a palace can.
There are certain Poets^ Rooms, frescoed with illus-
trations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is
the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used to
play chess together; there is the conservatory opening
from it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere
in the pictures and sculptures, the engraving and in-
taglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared,
the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful
Italian things. The prince was not so great a prince
but that he could verv nearlv be a man ; the court was
perhaps the most human court that ever was; the
Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon com-
panions, and then monarch and minister working to-
gether for the good of the country; they were always
friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of
the New World, which he carried with him, how far
from friends ! At best it was make-believe, the make-
believe of superiority and inferiority, the make-believe
of master and man, which could only be the more
painful and ghastly for the endeavor of two generous
spirits to reach and rescue each other through the
asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show of
equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was bom citi-
zen of a free republic, and his youth was nurtured in
the traditions of liberty; he was one of the greatest
souls of any time, and he must have known the im-
possibility of the thing they pretended; but he died
and made no sign, and the poet's friendship with the
prince has passed smoothly into history as one of the

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things that might really be. They worked and played
together; they dined and danced; they picnicked and
poetized, each on his own side of the impassable gulf,
with an air of its not being there which probably did
not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity.

A part of the palace was, of course, undergoing re-
pair; and in the gallery beyond the conservatory a
company of workmen were sitting at a table where
they had spread their luncheon. They were some-
what subdued by the consciousness of their august
environment; but the sight of them was charming;
they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had
wanted before, and which the Marches felt again in
another palace where the custodian showed them the
little tin dishes and saucepans which the German Em-
press Augusta and her sisters played with when they
were children. The sight of these was more affecting
even than the withered wreaths which they had left
on the death-bed of their mother, and which are still
mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the
height overlooking Weimar, where the grand-ducal fam-
ily spend the month of May, and where the stranger
finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Gk)ethe,
although the place is so full of relics and memorials of
the owners. It seemed, in fact, to be a storehouse for
the wedding-presents of the whole connection, which
were on show in every room ; Mrs. March hardly knew
whether they heightened the domestic effect or took
from it; but they enabled her to verify with the cus-
todian's help certain royal intermarriages which she had
been in doubt about before. Her zeal for these made
such favor with him that he did not spare them a
portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he
passed them over, scarcelv able to stand, to the gar-

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dener, who was to show them the open-air theatre where
Goethe used to take part in the plays.

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized
in the trained vines and clipped trees which formed
the coulisses. There was a grassy space for the chorus
and the commoner audience, and then a few semi-
circular gradines cut in the turf, one above another,
where the more honored spectators sat. Behind the
seats were plinths bearing the busts of Goethe, Schil-
ler, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and
if ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to
permit a performance, it must have been charming
to see a play in that open day to which the drama is
native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the
thick air of modern theatres it has long forgotten the
fact. It would be difficult to be Greek under a Ger-
man sk}', even when it was not actually raining, but
March held that with Goethe's help it might have
been done at Weimar, and his wife and he proved
themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theater that
the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put to-
gether a sheaf of the flowers that grew nearest it and
gave them to Mrs. March for a souvenir.

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks,
as from another eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely
little Weimar in the plain below. In a moment of
sunshine the prospect was very smiling, but their
spirits sank over their tea when it came ; they were at
least sorry they had not asked for coffee. Most of
the people about them were taking beer, including the
pretty girls of a young ladies' school, who were there
with their books and needle-work, in the care of one
of the teachers, apparently for the afternoon.

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much

engaged with their books or their needle-work but they

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had eyes for other things, and she followed the glances
of the girls till they rested upon the people at a tabic
somewhat obliquely to the left These were apparently
a mother and daughter, and they were listening to a
young man who sat with his back to Mrs. March and
leaned low over the table talking to them. They were
both smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept
turning herself from the waist up and slanting her face
from this side to that, as if to make sure that every one
saw her smiling.

Mrs. March felt her husband's gaze following her
own, and she had just time to press her finger firmly
on his arm and reduce his cry of astonishment to the
hoarse whisper in which he gasped, "Gkx)d gracious!
It's the pivotal girl !"

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother,
and with the young man, who had risen, too, came di-
rectly toward the Marches on their way out of the
place without noticing them, though Bumamy passed
so near that Mrs. March could almost have touched
him.

She had just strength to say, " Well, my dear! That
was the cut direct"

She said this in order to have her husband reassure
her. " Nonsense ! He never saw us. Why didn't you
speak to him ?"

" 8peaJc to him ? I never shall speak to him again.

ISol This is the last of Mr. Bumamy for me. I

shouldn't have minded his not recognizing us, for, as

you say, I don't believe he saw us ; but if he could go

back to such a girl as that, and flirt with her, after

Miss Triscoe, that's all I wish to know of him. Don't

you try to look him up, Basil. I'm glad — ^yes, I'm

glad — he doesn't know how Stoller has come to feel

about him ; he deserves to suffer, and I hope he'll keep

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on suffering. You were quite right, my dear — and it
shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don't
call it more than instinct) — not to tell hira what StoUer
said, and I don't want you ever should."

She had jisen in her excitement, and was making
off in such haste that she would hardly give him time
to pay for their tea, as she pulled him impatiently to
their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say : " I don't think I can
quite promise that; my mind's been veering round in
the other direction. I think X shall tell him."

"What! After you've seen him flirting with that
girl ? Very well, then, you won't, my dear ; that's all !
lie's behaving very basely to Agatha."

" What's his flirtation with all the girls in the uni-
verse to do with my duty to him ? He has a right to
know what Stoller thinks. And as to his behaving
badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So
far as you know, there is nothing whatever between
them. She either refused him outright, that last night
in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible conditions
with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and
I don't blame him."

" Consoling himself with a pivotal girl !" cried Mrs.
March.

" Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be
a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effect of tight
lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning and twisting
that way to get breath. But attribute the worst mo-
tive : say it is to make people look at her I Well, Bur-
namy has a right to look with the rest; and I am not
going to renounce him because he takes refuge with one
pretty girl from another. It's what men have been do-
ing from the bec;inning of time."

"Oh, Idaresav!"

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" Men/' he went on, " are very delicately consti-
tuted; very peculiarly. They have been ]aio\^ni to
seek the society of girls in general, of any girl, be- i

cause some girl has made them happy; and when \

some girl has made them unhappy they are still more
susceptible. Bumamy may be merely amusing him-
self, or he may be consoling himself; but in either
case I think the pivotal girl has as much right to him
as Miss Triscoe. She had him first; and I'm all for
her."

*Bumamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl
and her mother off on the train which they were tak-
ing that evening for Frankfort and Homburg, and
strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease
with himself. While he was with the girl and near
her he had felt the attraction by which youth imj)er-
sonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has
for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he
felt sick at heart and ashamed. He was aware of
having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain which
Avas always gnawing at him, and he had managed to
forget it in her folly; but now it came back, and the
sense that he had been reckless of her rights came w^ith
it. He had done his best to make her think him in
love with her by everything but words; he wondered
how he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, as to
try making her promise to write to him from Frank-
fort ; he wished never to see her again, and he wished
still less to hear from her. It was some comfort to
reflect that she had not promised, but it was not com-
fort enough to restore him to such fragmentary self-
respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with
Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get
back to the resentment with which he had been staying

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himself somewhat before the pivotal girl unexpectedly
appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no of-
ficial observance of the holiday, perhaps because the
Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with all the
other German princes. P>umamy had hoped for some
voluntary excitement among the people, at least enough
to warrant him in making a paper about Sedan Day
in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the
night was falling, and there was still no sign of popu-
lar rejoicing over the French humiliation twenty-eight
years before, except in the multitude of Japanese lan-
terns which the children were everywhere carrying at
the ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages,
and the effect of the floating lights in the winding, up-
and-down-hill streets was charming even to Burnamy's
lack-lustre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a
cafe with a garden, where there was a patriotic concert
promised; he supped there, and then sat dreamily be-
hind his beer, while the music banged and brayed round
him unheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter say-
ing in English, " May I sit at your table ?" and he
saw an ironical face looking down on him. " There
doesn't seem any other place."

" Why, Mr. March !" Bumamy sprang up and
wnmg the hand held out to him, but he choked with
his words of recognition; it was so good to see this
faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he
had seen him last, just when he had so little reason
to be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Bur-
namy, and then glanced round at the joyful jam of
people eating and drinking, under a firmament of lan-
terns. " This is pretty," he said, *' mighty pretty. I

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shall make Mrs. March sorry for not coining when I go
back/'

" Is Mrs. March — she is — ^with you — ^in Weimar f"
Bumamy asked, stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him, " Oh yee.
We saw you out at Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs.
March thought for a moment that you meant not to see
us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those
little flights."

" I never dreamed of your being there — I never
saw — '' Burnamy began.

" Of course not Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss
Etkins; she was looking very pretty. Have you been
here some time ?"

" Not long. A week or so. I've been at the parade
at Wiirzburg."

" At Wiirzburgl Ah, how little the world is, or how
large Wiirzburg is ! We were there nearly a week, and
we pervaded the place. But there was a great crowd
for you to hide in from us. What had I better take ?"
A waiter had come up, and was standing at March's
elbow. " I suppose I mustn't sit here without ordering
something ?"

" White wine and selters," said Bumamy, vaguely.

" The very thing! Why didn't I think of it? It's
a divine drink: it satisfies without filling. I had it
a night or two before we left home, in the Madison
Square Roof Garden. Have you seen Every Other
WeeJclsitelyV'

" No," said Bumamy, with more spirit than he had
yet shown.

"We've just got our mail from Nuremberg. The
last number has a poem in it that I rather like."
March laughed to see the young fellow's face light up
with joyful consciousness. " Come round to my ho-

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tel, after you're tired here, and I'll let you see it.
There's no hurry. Did you notice the little children
with their lanterns as you came along? It's the gen-
tlest effect that a war-like memory ever came to. The
French themselves couldn't have minded those inno-
cents carrying those soft lights on the day of their
disaster. You ought to get something out of that,
and I've got a subject in trust for you from Hose
Adding. He and his mother were at Wurzburg; I'm
sorry to say the poor little chap didn't seem very well.
They've gone to Holland for the sea air." March had
been talking for quantity in compassion of the em-
barrassment in which Bumamy seemed bound; but
he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to
the young fellow merely because he liked him. So
far as he could make out, Bumamy had been doing
rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they
had met ; and it was by an impulse that he could not
have logically defended to Mrs. March that he re-
sumed. *' We found another friend of yours in Wiirz-
burg — Mr. Stoller."

" Mr. Stoller ?" Bumamy faintly echoed.

" Yes ; he was there to give his daughters a holiday
during the manceuvres ; and they made the most of it
He wanted us to go to the parade with his family, but
we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death
of General Triscoe."

Again Bumamy echoed him. " Greneral Triscoe ?"

" Oh yes ; I didn't tell you. General Triscoe and
his daughter had come on with Mrs. Adding and Rose.
Kenby — you remember Kenby, on the Norumbmf —
Kenby happened to be there, too ; we were quite a fam-
ily party; and Stoller got the general to drive out to
the manoeuvres with him and his girls."

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed

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letting himself go. He did not know what he should
say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having
told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at
him ; he pushed on recklessly upon the principle, which
probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well
be hung for a sheep as a lamb. " I have a message for
you from Mr. Stoller."

" For me ?" Burnamy gasped.

" I've been wondering liow I should put it, for I
hadn't expected to see you. But it's simply this: he
wants you to know — and he seemed to want me to
know — that he doesn't hold you accountable in the
way he did. lie's thought it all over, and he's de-
cided that he had no right to expect you to save him
from his own ignorance where he was making a show
of knowledge. As he said, he doesn't choose to plead
the baby act. He says that you're all right, and your
place on the paper is open to you."

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now
he seemed braced for instant response. " I think he'a
wrong," he said, so harshly that the people at the next
table looked round. " His feeling as he does has noth-
ing to do with the fact, and it doesn't let me out."

March would have liked to take him in his arms;
he merely said, " I think you're quite right as to that.
But there's such a thing as forgiveness, you know. It
doesn't change the nature of what you've done ; but as
far as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it."

" Yes, I understand that. But I can't accept his for-
giveness if I hate him."

" But perhaps you won't always hate him. Somo

day you may have a chance to do him a good turn.

It's rather hanale; but there doesn't seem any other

way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you

going with me to get that poem ?"

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When March had given Bumamy the paper at his
hotel, and Biimamy had put it in his pocket, the young
man said he thought he would take some coffee, and he
asked March to join him in the dining-room where they
had stood talking.

" No, thank you," said the elder, " I don't propose
sitting up all night, and you'll excuse me if I go to
bed now. It's a little informal to leave a guest — "

"You're not leaving a guest! I'm at home here.
I'm staying in this hotel, too."

March said, " Oh !" and then he added, abruptly,
" Good-night," and went up-stairs under the fresco of
the five poets.

" Whom were you talking with below ?" asked Mrs.
March through the door opening into his room from
hers.

" Bumamy," he answered from within. " He's stay-
ing in this house. He let me know just as I was going
to turn him out for the night. It's one of those little
uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in
great things."

" Oh ! Then you've been telling him," she said, with
a mental bound high above and far beyond the point

" Everything."

"About Stoller, too?"

" About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Add-
ing and Rose and Kenby and General Triscoe and
Agatha."

"Very well. That's what I call shabby. Don't
ever talk to me again about the inconsistencies of
women. But now there's something perfectly fear-
ful."

"WTiatisit?"

" A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were,
gone, asking us to find rooms in some hotel for her

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and her father to-morrow. He isn't well, and they're
coming. And I've telegraphed them to come here.
Now what do you say ?"

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs.
March could not resign herself to it till her husband
suggested that she should consider it providential.
This touched the lingering superstition in which she
had been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a
means, when in a very tight place, and to leave the
responsibility with the moral government of the uni-
verse. As she now perceived, it had been the same
as ordered that they should see Burnamy under such
conditions in the afternoon tliat they could not speak
to him and hear where he was staying; and in an in-
ferior degree it had been the same as ordered that
March should see him in the evening and tell him
everything, so that she should know just how to act
when she saw him in the morning. If he could plau-
sibly account for the renewal of his flirtation with Miss
Etkins, or if he seemed generally worthy apart from
that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast,
with his well-remembered smile, that she did not re-
quire from him any explicit defence. While they
talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of
drama with Miss Triscoe, and explaining to her that
they could not possibly wait over for her and her
father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Ber-
lin, as they had made all their plans. It was not easy,
even in drama where one has everything one's own
way, to prove that she could not without impiety so
far interfere with the course of Providence as to pro-
vent Miss Triscoe's coming with her father to the
same hotel where Bumamy was staying. She con-
trived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known

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he was staying there when she telegraphed them where
to come, and that in the absence of any open con-
fidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obliged to sup-
pose that his presence would be embarrassing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while
he went up into the town and interviewed the house
of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and as soon
as he got himself away she came to business, break-
ing altogether from the inner drama with Miss Tris-
coe and devoting herself to Burnamy. They had al-
ready got so far as to have mentioned the meeting
with the Triscoes in Wiirzburg, and she said : " Did
Mr. March tell you they were coming here? Or, no!
We hadn't heard then. Yes, they are coming to-mor-
row. They may be going to stay some time. She talk-
ed of Weimar when we first spoke of Germany on the
ship.'' Burnamy said nothing, and she suddenly add-
ed, with a sharp glance : " They wanted us to get them
rooms, and we advised their coming to this house." He
started very satisfactorily, and " Do you think they
would be comfortable here ?" she pursued.

" Oh yes, very. They can have my room ; it's south-
east; I shall be going into other quarters." She did
not say anything; and "Mrs. March," he began
again, "what is the use of my beating about the
bush? You must know what I went back to Carls-
bad for that night — "

" No one ever told — "

" Well, you must have made a pretty good guess.
But it was a failure. I ought to have failed, and I
did. She said that unless her father liked it — And
apparently he hasn't liked it" Burnamy smiled rue-
fully.

" How do you know ? She didn't know where you
were 1"

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" She could have got word to me if she had had good
news for me. They've forwarded other letters from
Pupp's. But it's all right; I had no business to go
back to Carlsbad. Of course, you didn't know I was in
this house when you told them to come; and I must
clear out. I had better clear out of Weimar, too."

" No, I don't think so ; I have no right to pry into
your affairs, but — ^"

" Oh, they're wide enough open !"

" And you may have changed your mind. I thought
you might when I saw you yesterday at Belvedere — "

" I was only trying to make bad worse."

" Then I think the situation has changed entirely
through what Mr. StoUer said to Mr. March."

" I can't see how it has. I committed an act of
shabby treachery, and I'm as much to blame as if he
still wanted to punish me for it."

" Did Mr. March say that to you ?"

"No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn't
answer it, and you can't. You're very good and very
kind, but you can't answer it."

"I can answer it very well," she boasted; but she
could find nothing better to say than, " It's your duty
to her to see her and let her know."

" Doesn't she know already ?"

" She has a right to know it from you. I think
you are morbid, Mr. Bumamy. You know very well
I didn't like your doing that to Mr. StoUer. I didn't
say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it enough
yourself. But I did like your owning up to it," and
here Mrs. March thought it time to trot out her bor-
rowed battle-horse again. "My husband always says
that if a person owns up to an error, fully and f aith-
ftdly, as you've always done, they make it the same in
its consequences to them as if it had never been done.'^

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" Does Mr. March say that ?" asked Bumamy, with
a relenting smile.

"Indeed he does!"

Bumamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily, again:
" And what about the consequences to the other fel-
low?"

" A woman," said Mrs. March, " has no concern
with them. And besides, I think you've done all you
cotdd to save Mr. Stoller from the consequences."

" I haven't done anything."

"No matter. You would if you could. I won-
der," she broke off, to prevent his persistence at a
point where her nerves were beginning to give way,
" what can be keeping Mr. March ?"

Nothing much more important, it appeared later,
than the pleasure of sauntering through the streets on
the way to the house of Schiller and looking at the
pretty children going to school with books under their
arras. It was the day for the schools to open after the
long summer vacation, and there was a freshness of
expectation in the shining faces which, if it could not
light up his own gray-beard visage, could at least touch
his heart.

When he reached the Schiller house he found that
it was really not the Schiller house, but the Schiller
flat, of three or four rooms, one flight up, whose win-
dows look out upon the street named after the poet.
The whole place is bare and clean; in one comer of
the large room fronting the street stands Schiller's
writing-table, with his chair before it; with the foot
extending toward this there stands, in another corner,
the narrow bed on which he died; some withered
wreaths on the pillow frame a picture of his death-
mask, which at first glance is like his dead face lying
there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather touch-
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ing, and the place with its meagre appointments, as
compared with the rich Goethe house, suggests that
personal competition with Goethe in which Schiller
is always falling into the second place. Whether it
will be finally so with him in literature it is too early
to ask of time, and upon other points eternity will
not be interrogated. " The great Goethe and the good
Schiller," they remain ; and yet, !March reasoned, there
was something good in Goethe and something great in
Schiller.

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality
before the world that he did not heed the warning on
the door of the pastry-shop near the Schiller house,
and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh
paint on it He was then in such a state that he could
not bring his mind to bear upon the question of which
cakes his wife would probably prefer, and he stood helj)-
lessly holding up his hand till the good woman behind
the counter discovered his plight and uttered a loud cry
of compassion. She ran and got a wet napkin, which
she rubbed with soap, and then she instructed him by
word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, and she did
not leave him till his rescue was complete. He let her
choose a variety of the cakes for him, and came away
with a gay paper bag full of them, and with the feeling
that he had been in more intimate relations with the
life of Weimar than travellers are often privileged to
be. He argued from the instant and intelligent sym-
pathy of the pastry woman a high grade of culture in
all classes; and he conceived the notion of pretending
to Mrs. March that he had got these cakes from a de-
scendant of Schiller.

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment
in which she always, after so many years' experience
of his duplicity, believed anything he told her. They

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dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Bur-
namy came down to the station with them and was
very comfortable to March in helping him to get their
tickets and their baggage registered. The train which
was to take them to Halle, where they were to change
for Berlin, was rather late, and they had but ten min-
utes after it came in before it would start again. Mrs.
March was watching impatiently at the window of the
waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear
the platform and allow the doors to be opened ; sudden-
ly she gave a cry, and turned and ran into the passage
by which the new arrivals were pouring out toward the
superabundant omnibuses. March and Bumamy, who
had been talking apart, mechanically rushed after her
and found her kissing Miss Triscoe and shaking hands
with the general amid a tempest of questions and an-
swers, from which it appeared that the Triscoes had
got tired of staying in Wiirzburg, and had simply come
on to Weimar a day sooner than they had intended.

The general was rather much bundled up for a day
which was mild for a German summer day, and he
coughed out an explanation that he had taken an
abominable cold at that ridiculous parade and had
not shaken it off yet. He had a notion that change
of air would be better for him ; it could not be worse.

He seemed a little vague as to Bnmaray, rather
than inimical. While the ladies were still talking
eagerly together in proffer and acceptance of Mrs.
March's lamentations that she should be going away
just as Miss Triscoe was coming, he asked if the om-
nibus for their hotel was there. He by no means re-
sented Bumamy's assurance that it was, and he did
not refuse to let him order their baggage, little and
large, loaded upon it. By the time this was done,

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe bad so far detached

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themselves from each other that they could separate
after one more formal expression of r^ret and for-
giveness. With a lament into which she poured a
world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenched
herself from the place and suffered herself to he push-
ed toward her train. But with the last long look which
she cast over her shoulder, before she vanished into the
waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe and Bumamy trans-
acting the elaborate politeness of amiable strangers with
regard to the very small bag which the girl had in her
hand. He succeeded in relieving her of it ; and then ho
led the way out of the station on the left of the general,
while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear.

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XVI

Fbom the window of the train as it drew out Mrs.
March tried for a glimpse of the omnibus in which
her proteges were now rolling away together. As they
were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which was itself
out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her
seat she treated the recent incident with a complexity
and simultaneity of which no report can give an idea.
At the end one fatal conviction remained : that in every-
thing she had said she had failed to explain to Miss
Triscoe how Bumamy happened to be in Weimar and
how he happened to be there with them in the station.
She required March to say how she had overlooked the
very things which she ought to have mentioned first,
and which she had on the point of her tongue the whole
time. She went over the entire ground again to see
if she could discover the reason why she had made
such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that sho
was led to it by his rushing after her with Bumamy
before she had had a chance to say a word about him;
of course, she could not say anything in his presence.
This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation
in the fact that she had left them together without the
least intention or connivance and now, no matter what
happened, she could not accuse herself, and he could
not accuse her of match-making.

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great
that he should not dream of accusing her of anything
except of regret that now she could never claim the

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credit of bringing the lovers together under circum-
stances 80 favorable. As soon as they were engaged
they could join in renouncing her with a good con-
science, and they would probably make this the basis
of their efforts to propitiate the general.

She said she did not care, and with the mere re-
moval of the lovers in space her interests in them be-
gan to abate. They began to be of a minor impor-
tance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle,
and in the excitement of settling into the express from
Frankfort there were moments when they were alto-
gether forgotten. The car was of almost American
length, and it ran with almost American smoothness;
when the conductor came and collected an extra faro
for their seats, the Marches felt that if the charge had
been two dollars instead of two marks they would have
had every advantage of American travel.

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile
and flat, and now sterile and flat; near the capital the
level sandy waste spread almost to its gates. The train
ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs, and
then they were in one of those vast Continental stations
which put our out-dated depots to shame. The good
traeger who took possession of them and their hand-
bags put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky, and
then got them another drosky for their personal trans-
portation. This was a drosky of the first-class, but they
would not have thought it so, either from the vehicle
itself or from the appearance of the driver and his
horses. The public carriages of Germany are the shab-
biest in the world; at Berlin the horses look like old
hair trunks and the drivers like their moth-eaten con-
tents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices

they paid, and their approach to their hotel on Unter

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den Linden was as nnimpressive as the ignoble avenue
itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean,
tiresome street slopped and splashed under its two
rows of small trees, to which the thinning leaves clung
like wet rags, between long lines of shops and hotels
which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandi-
osity of New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

"Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,
Under the Lindens?"

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in
Boston could be imagined with its trees and without
their beauty, flanked by the architecture of Sixth Ave-
nue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that
would be the famous Unter den Linden, where she
had so resolutely decided that they would stay while
in Berlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could
blame the other because it proved second-rate in every-
thing 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 fin-
ished, 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-

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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 ad-
mirably 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 dif-
fused 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 al-
ways hot WTien they were ready to go, March experi-
enced from the apathy of the baggage clerk and the
reluctance of the porters a more piercing distress than
anv he had knoAvn at the railroad stations; and one
luckless valise which he ordered sent after him by ex-
press 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 tem-
perament 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 super-
abounding 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

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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 fig-
ure, and among the women no style such as relieves the
commonplace rush of the New York streets. The Ber-
liners 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 under-
sized homely folk of the lower classes there is no such
poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults tho
sight in New York. That which distinctly recalls our
metropolis is the lofty passage of the elevated trains
intersecting the perspectives 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 cele-
bration of the German triimiph 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 obscure streets, but otherwise all is as

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new as Boston^ whlch^ in f act^ the actual Berlin hardlj
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 them-
selves 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 im-
pression. 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 modem Prussian avatar of the old German
romantic spirit, and bears the same relation to it that
modem 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 Prus-
sian Emperor in the war with the last French Emperor,
and avenging the vanquished upon the victors by its
ugliness. The imgainly 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 Ranch's great statue
of the great Frederick. To come to it from the sim-
plicity 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

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which must otherwise weigh upon them. They en-
tered the court without opposition from the sentinel,
and joined other strangers straggling instinctively tow-
ard 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 in-
clined planes of brick to the state apartments. In the
antechamber they found a provision of immense felt
overshoes 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 somewhat 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 upon 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 na-
tional; 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 foimd it tiresome beyond the tiresome wont

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of palaces^ and he gladly shook off the senfle 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 be-
lieve, 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 coijapicuous in the imperial
capital; but possibly because the troops were nearly
all away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly moro
in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Wash-
ington. 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 Bran-
denburg gate, without music, or so much style as our
own militia often puts on, regarded her with inof-
fensive eyes so far as they looked at her. She de-
clared that personally there was nothing against the
Prussians; even when in tmiform 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.

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

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intelligent appreciation of the dinner; and from him
they formed a more respectful opinion of Berlin civ-
ilization 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 police-
men and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen ; for by
these rather than by its society women and its states-
men 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 rail-
road caf6 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 favor-
able 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 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 gar-
den hose upon the shrubbery already soaked and shud-
dering in the cold. But this convinced them that they
were suffering from weather and jiot from the climate,
which must really be hot and dry ; and they went home
to their hotel and sat contentedly down in a tempera-
ture 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 sum-

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mer; then it changed to a harsh November air; and
then it relented and ended so mildly that they hired
chairs in tlie place before the imperial palace for five
pfennigs each^ and sat watching the life before them.
Motherly women folk were there knitting; two Amer-
ican 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
school-boys 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
en 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 unpictu-
resque, 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 in-
clement air of September suggested a friendly gayety,

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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
trestles 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 over-
crowded. 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 Avith-
out order or continuity among the meadows and vege-
table-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 paint-
ings than out of them. The second morning the waiter
who took his order recognized him and asked, " Wie
gestem ?" and from this he argued an affectionate con-
stancy in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of
the tastes of strangers. At his bankers', on the other

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hand, the cashier scrutinized his signature and remark-
ed 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 Gtermany. In starting for Potsdam
he asked a traeger where the Potsdam train was, and
tlie 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 wide-
spread knowledge of our language in aU classes of the
population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied con-
temporary civilization in the capital. He even carried
his researches further, and went one rainy afternoon
to an exhibition of modem 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 smnmer
theatre where they gave the pantomime of the " Pup-
penfee " and the operetta of " Hansel und Gretel," he
observed that the greater part of the audience was com-
posed 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 must 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.

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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 horse-
cars 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.

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 sur-
rounding 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 be-
fore they were led through Voltaire's room and Fred-
erick'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

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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 im-
portant 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
rococo statues, and within it is rich in all those curi-
osities 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 foimtain of the Orangeries they dedicated a mo-

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ment 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 rococo 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 nat-
urally 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 say-
ing 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 jieople 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 chil-
dren with that severity which Solomon urged but prob-
ably 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 man-
ner made them his honored guests. They saw every-

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thing 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 door-
way without knowing it; but from the window over-
looking 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
al fresco 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'eeuvre con-
tains 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, Wilhel-
mina, did so much to demolish in the regard of men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there
is a chamber where Tfapoleon 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 chaml)or 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 custo-
dian 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.

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Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when
he let them out of his carriage at the station he ex-
cused 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, con-
tributed to the content in which they reviewed their
visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the place was per-
fectly charming, and that it was incomparably expres-
sive 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 amid the futile mon-
uments of the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where
all the portraits, effigies, personal belongings and me-
morials 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 me-
morials of the kings and queens, the emperors and
empresses were carefully ordered, and felt no kind-
ness except before the relics relating to the Emperor
Frederick and his mother. In the presence of the great-
est 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.

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xvn

The rough weather which made Berlin ahnost un-
inhabitable 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 alto-
gether and went to bed. Here he escaped the bron-
chitis which had attacked him, and his convalesence
left him so little to complain of that he could not al-
ways keep his temper. In the absence of actual of-
fence, either from his daughter or from Bumamy, his
sense of injury took a retroactive form ; it centred first
in StoUer and the twins ; then it diverged toward Kose
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 Bumamy 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
overvalue Bumamy's sacrifice and devotion, and that
it was not an unmixed pleasure, however gceat a con-
venience, to have him about. In giving up his room,
Bumamy had proposed going out of the hotel alto-
gether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost
as great vexation as he had accepted the room. Ho
besought him not to go, but so ungraciously that his
daughter was ashamed and tried to atone for his man-
ner by the kindness of her own.

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Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been with-
out 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 lux-
uries 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 Bumamy, and he did not
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 un-
just to Bumamy. She would not avoid him ; she would
not let anything that had happened keep her from show-
ing 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 papei's ; 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 ad-
vantage 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 Bumamy for the first time, and she said : " I
suppose vou must have been all over Weimar by this
time.^^

" Well, Vve been here, off and on, almost a month.
It's an interesting place. There's a good deal of the
old literary quality left.''

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" 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 Ij'ing about loose exactly." Even in the
serious and perplexing situation in which he foimd
himself he could not help being amused with her un-
literary 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 lady-like composure and unconsciousness, and
wondered if she could be the same person and he 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; per-
haps 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 afterward,
she seemed willing enough to speak of what had hap-
pened since : of coming on to Wiirzburg with the Add-
ings and of finding the Marches there; of Kose's col-
lapse, and of liis 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

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WuTzburg 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 pres-
ence, 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 serWce 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 Bumamy from the mo-
ment they first saw each other at the station. He had
tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on his ar-
rival, 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 hiiu
to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when
August knocked at his door, and oflPered 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 ever-
greens. From the habit of doing this they one day

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suddenly fomied 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 fre-
quenters 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 Braut 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 Amer-
icans much extenuation was found for whatever was
phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each
other's society.

If their free American association was indistin-
guishably 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 ex-
tended 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 foimd consola-
tion in their difference pt opinion and the consequent
contempt which he was enabled to cherish for the doctor

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in view of the man's complete ignorance of the case.
In proof of his own better understanding of it, he re-
mained 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 aflFairs had gone with his daughter and Bumamy,
though even then his observance seemed to have an-
ticipated theirs. He found them in a quiet accept-
ance 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 eifect 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 Bumamy over the pleasure and priv-
ilege 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. " A\rhat 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,

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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 oa
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, grow-
ing 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 noth-
ing 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, dis-
missed her, but she left him without apparent griev-
ance, saying, quietly, " I will send August"

Agatha did not come dovm to supper with Bur-
namy. She asked August, when she gave him her
father's order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room,

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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 museimi with the airy light-
ness of an American moon. Below was Burnamy be-
hind the tubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair
against the house wall, with the spark of his cigar faint-
ing and flashing like an American fire -fly. 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. DonH 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

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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. Tie 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 V

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 1'*

^* 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 8i)oken 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 bo-
cause 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 1"

" 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

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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 encyclopfledian
reserve two or three facts appeared with a present dis-
tinctness. One of these was that Bumamy had re-
garded 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 touched by his trusting
her enough to come back while he was still under that
cloud with IVfr. 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. Bumamy owned that he knew
what Stoller had said, but even in his present condi-
tion he could not accept fully her reading of that ob-
scure passage of his life. ITe preferred to put the ques-
tion 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 Bumamy
which expressed itself by scarcely more than a spirit-
ual 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/'

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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 Bumamy 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 Bumamy's parted. She went into her own room,
and softly opened the door into her father's and lis-
tened.

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

" Have you been asleep ?" she asked.

" I've just blown out my light. A\Tiat 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.
Bumamy."

" Light the candle," said her father. " Or no," ho
added, before she could do so. " Is it quite settled t"

"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.

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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 good-
night, 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 imder 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 laugh-
ter 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 en-
gagement 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 for-
mality. 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

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it was certainly not hopelessly discouraging. They
agreed at breakfast that Bumamy 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.
Bumamy," said General Triscoe, in a tone which was
rather judicial than otherwise, " and I suppose you
know why you have come." The words certainly open-
ed the way for Bumamy, 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 sup-
porting her are. How much did you earn on that news-
paper in Chicago ?"

"Fifteen hundred dollars," Bumamy 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
StoUer?"

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

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
Bumamy, proudly.

" Since you have broken with StoUer, 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 1" cried Bur-
namy. " 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 gen-
eral, unmoved by the young fellow's pain, and unper-
turbed 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 know-
ingly a rascal, but he's ignorantly a rascal, and he pro-
posed a rascally thing to me. I behaved badly to him,
and I'd give anything to imdo the wrong I let him do
himself; but I'll never go back to him."

" If you went back on your old salary," the gen-
eral 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 sup-
porting my daughter on the scale she is used to? I
don't speak of your mother, who has the first claim upon

you."

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Bumamy sat dumb, and bis bead, which he had
lifted indignantly when the question was of StoUer,
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 stran-
ger-»

" Not quite a stranger, General Triseoe,'' Bumamy
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 gen-
eral continued, so pleased with the logical perfection
of bis position that he almost smiled and certainly
softened toward Bumamy. " It isn't a question of
liking you, Mr. Bumamy, but of knowing you; my
daughter likes you; so do the Marches; so does every-
body 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 onr 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 him-
self."

" I did. I don't excuse it. The thought of it bums
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 stopped the mischief ; and
I didn't! I can never outlive f/wi^"

" 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 vou would never see her again. What did

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

itr

" 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 oifered 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, / 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 1" As nearly as a man could, in bed. General
Triscoe shrugged.

" I suppose I had a right to be in my own room.
I conldn't help hearing; and I was perfectly aston-
ished 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," Bumamy began, but she
cut him short almost as severely as she had dealt with
her father.

" Tea, it does ! It justifies you perfectly ! And his
wanting you to falsify the whole thing afterward 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

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before, addressing herself now to one and now to the
other.

"And besides, if it didn't justify you, what yoii
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 lit-
tle 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 be-
lieve he would ever have said anything again — if I
hadn't fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I didl" 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 child-like impetuosity. " And as for the rest,"
she declared, " everything I have is his, just as every-
thing of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if he
wishes to take me without anything, then he can have

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me 80, and I sha'nH 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/"

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the pa-
tience which soldiers learn. He did not submit amia-
bly; that would have been out of character, and per-
haps out of reason ; but Bumamy 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 satis-
faction, 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 Bumamy 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 dis-
turbed in anv of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of
his living; and until Bumamy was at least self-sup-
porting there must be no talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough
for the time. Tt included complete and minute auto-
biographies on both sides, reciprocal analyses of char-
acter, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes,
ideas, and opinions ; a profound study of their respect-
ive chins, noses, eyes, hands, heights, complexions,
moles, and freckles, with some account of their sev-
eral 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 in-
stant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which
the persistent anxiety of General Triscoe interposed
before the date of their lea^^ng Weimar for Paris,

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where it was arranged that they should spend a month
before sailing for New York. Biimamy 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, coimting 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 Bur-
namy'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 comer,

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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
for 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 light-
ly enough, " Was ist dass, August ?"

His smile deepened and broadened. " Fiir die An-
dere," he explained.

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

" Oddaw lehdy."

" Other lady ?" August nodded, rejoicing in his
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 bou-
quet in her hands. " Now, August," she said, very
calmly, " I want you to tell me — ich wiinsche Sie zu
mir sagen — what other lady — wass andere Dame —
these flowers belonged to — diese Blumen gehorte zu.
VerstehenSie?"

August nodded brightly, and with Gterman carefully
adjusted to Agatha's capacity, and with now and then
a word or phrase of English, he conveyed that before

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she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had
been in Weimar another American Fraulein with her
Frau Mother ; they had not, indeed, stayed in that ho-
tel, but had several times supped there with the young
Herr Bomahmee, who was occupying that room be-
fore 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 through-
out by the friendly intelligence of the gracious Frau-
lein, who smiled radiantly in clearing up one dim point
after another, and who now and then supplied the Eng^
lish 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 t<)
a caf6 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 baJcony,

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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 r

" On the shelf."

It seemed a long time before Bumamy 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.

" W^as 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 be-
fore you had the room ?"

Bumamy 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.

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"It would onlv be fair. You made me," he re-
joined, and there was something so charming in his
words and waj 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 be-
gan that it seemed as if he had forgotten again. " Why,
it's nothing. Miss Etkins and her mother were here be-
fore 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

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had ex-
acted. She sat reclined in the comer of the seat, with
her head drooping. After an interval which was long
to Bumamy 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 toward Bumamy 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

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lie stood a moment bewildered; then he pressed after
her. " Agatha, do you — ^you don't mean — '*

" Yes," she said, without looking roimd 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 be-
lieved 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 bo
so imjust! 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 Fm 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, al-
most breathlessly, and she gave him no chance to get
out the words that sr?emed to choke him. She began
to Tuny but at the door of the hotel she stopped and
waited till he came stupidly up. " I have a favor to
ask, Mr. Bumamy. 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

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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 diflSculty, when he came down to get into the
onmibus 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 isnH 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 5klr. 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 con-
trary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly from his
sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust him-
self 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 con-
viction by a burst of sobbing that lasted well on the
way to the first stop of the train.

Digitized by VjOOQIC

XVIII

It would have been always twice as easy to go di-
rect 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 Diisseldorf, where Heinrich Heine
was bom. Without this Mrs. March, who kept her hus-
band up to his early passion for the poet with a feel-
ing that she was defending him from age in it, said
that their silver wedding journey would not be com-
plete ; 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, tow-
ered and steepled and red-roofed within its medieval
walls, looked as if it woidd have been warmer in some-
thing 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 dis-
persing the cold, which was afterward 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 breakfastrtime.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course;

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when they implored the portier for at least a lamp to
warm their hands hy he turned on all the electric
lights without raising the temperature in the slightest
degree. Amid these modem comforts they were so
miserable that they vowed each other to shun, as long
as they were in Germany, or at least while the sum-
mer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and
electric - lighted. They heated themselves somewhat
with their wrath, and over their breakfast they re-
lented 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 every-
where. 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 after-
ward 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 over-
built. The modem 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

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must have been; but it must have been unusually in-
offensive, for it left no record of itself in the travel-
lers' 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 plu-
tocratic 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 out-
side.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were
not on his letter of credit; he would have been will-
ing 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 pene-
trate 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 Itotlis-
child 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 Bumamy was getting on, and
whether it had yet come to that imderstanding 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
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about in the Goethe house in Weimar, and of an
emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow-
sight -seers. They could make sure, afterward, 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 re-
joiced in for so long a life, and which, dying, he im-
plored 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 bom. 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

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reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze
of the only means of heating that they have in IVank-
fort 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 peo-
ple, 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 un-
der 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 ab-
sence, 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-ex-
amination could not prove that this cathedral was
memorably different from hundreds of other four-
teenth-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 con-
fined 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 fel-
low-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and more to
not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frank-
fort, and as the breadth of sunshine increased with
the approach of noon, they gave the rest of the morn-
ing to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the out-
side of many Gothic churches, whose names even thejr

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did not trouble themselves to learn. They liked the
river Main whenever they came to it, becaiise it was
so lately from Wiirzburg, and because it was so beau-
tiful 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 fascinat-
ing bargains in curious crockery and wooden - war^
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 market-
place, 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 nimierous
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 dining-
room, where the Marches had a mid -day dinner so
good that it almost made amends for the steam-heat-
ing and electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train
for Mayence, and ran Rhineward through a pretty
country into what seemed a milder climate. It grew
so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their com-
partment, 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 i)eremptorily as
it had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse
whisper, " She may be another Baroness 1" 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 Wiirzburg, and he perceived that

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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, dis-
agreeable woman, of no more perceptible distinction
than their other fellow-passenger, a little commercial
traveller from Vienna (they resolved from his appear-
ance and the lettering on his valise that he was no
other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all
the way to Mayence.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they ap-
proached 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 Wein-
handlung at a comer 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 purse-proud metropolis
in America. To be sure, they said, the Grerman 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

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sKores 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
baffled, and left them to the ministrations of the serv-
ing-men who arrived with their large and small bag-
gage. 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 iad come lu^ng a heavy
hod of coal and a great arm-load of wood, but because
her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange de-
mand.

" What !" she cried. " A fire in September P'

^^ Yes," March returned, inspired to miraculous apt-
ness 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 temper-
ature of the place rose to at least sixty-five Fahren-
heit, 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

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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, in-
telligent people, and would have been conversable, ap-
parently, but for the terrible cold of the husband,
which he said he had contracted at the manoeuvres in
Homburg. 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 suf-
fering from a suspense of faith as to the warmth any-
where ; 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 Amer-
icans 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 shone,
by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the
younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned Brit-
ish offishness seemed to have fallen to the American
travellers who were trying to be correct and exem-
plary; 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 land-

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scape, the (German weather, the Grennan government,
the German railway management, and then turned out
an American of German birth 1

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 lac-
quered 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 be-
fore the fire was kindled, and she required her hus-
band 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 be-
fore any one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in
its new place. Then they both breathed freer, and re-
turned 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 cham-
bermaid 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 destniction upon its
own terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had

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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 Amer-
ican 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 bleeding country save!"

and then, with a laughing good-night, these unseen,
unknown spirits of youth parted and departed. Who
were they, and in what diiferent 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 dream-
ing 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 hoofs 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 uni-
form and some in civil dress with students* caps, loose-
ly 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

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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 seem-
ed 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 fash-
ionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkle<l
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 a long 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 headless, or whether some-
where in it he felt the historical majesty, the long hu-
man 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 Bet-
ter 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 in his heart,
which was perhaps really a wish to be at work again.

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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 Diisseldorf they be-
lieved they should push on to Uolland mthout stop-
ping; and March would have liked to ask, Why not
push on to America? But he forbore, and he was
afterward 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 in-
struments of justice."

"Do you suppose that clock was never baked bo-
fore ?" 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."

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 manu-
factories 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

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low grassy shores. It was like the Mississippi be-
tween 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 in-
ternational aiHnition, 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 wheth-
er 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 superabun-
dant wraps. At times March actually lifted a shawl
from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was Eng-
lish 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 board, either from the baskets they had

brought with them or from the boat's provision. But

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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 dis-
appearance. 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 mo-
ments 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 bom,
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 Hud-

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son scenery ; and they recalled one point on the Amer-
ican river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting
cliff, which might very well pass for the rock of the
Loreley, where she dreams

Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,

and the trains run in and out under her knees un-
heeded. " 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 differ-
ence. Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be suhlime ;
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 Gterman
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 denJcmal 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 or-
chards 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 find-
ing something familiar and dear in the heart of the
strangeness.

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of getting
ashore with their baggage and driving from the steam-
boat landing to the railroad station, where they were
to get their train for Diisseldorf an hour later. The

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station swarmed with travellers eating and drinking
and smoking; but they escaped from it for a precious
half of their golden hour, and gave the time to the
great cathedral, which was built, a thousand years ago,
just round the comer from the station, and is there-
fore very handy to it. Since they saw the cathedral
last it had been finished, and now under a cloudless
evening sky it soared and swept upward like a pale
flame. Within it was a bit overclean, a bit bare, but
without it was one of the great memories of the race,
the record of a faith which wrought miracles of beauty,
at least, if not piety.

The train gave the Marches another, a last, view of
it as they slowly drew out of the city and began to
run through a level country walled with far-off hills;
past fields of buckwheat showing their stems like coral
under their black tops; past peasant houses changing
their wonted shape to taller and narrower forms; past
sluggish streams from which the mist rose and hung
over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassy clear till
the manifold factory chimneys of Diisseldorf stained it
with their dun smoke.

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the town
where Ileinrich Heine was bom; but when they had
eaten their supper in the capital little hotel they found
there, and went out for a stroll, they found nothing to
remind them of the factories, and much to make them
think of the poet. The moon, beautiful and perfect
as a stage moon, came up over the shoulder of a church
as they passed down a long street which they had all
to themselves. Everybody seemed to have gone to bed,
but at a certain comer a girl opened a window above
them and looked out at the moon. When they returned
to their hotel they found a high-walled garden facing
it, full of black depths of foliage. In the night March

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woke and saw the moon standing over the garden and
silvering its leafy tops. This was really as it should
be in the town where the idolized poet of his youth was
bom; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and
who had once seemed like a living friend; who had
been witness of his first love, and had helped him to
speak it His wife used to laugh at him for his Heine
worship in those days ; but she had since come to share
it, and she, even more than he, had insisted upon this
pilgrimage. He thought long thoughts of the past, as
he looked into the garden across the way, with an ache
for his perished self and the dead companionship of his
youth, all ghosts together in the silvered shadow. The
trees shuddered in the night breeze, and its chill pene-
trated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, " What are
you doing ?"

" Oh, sentimentalizing," he answered, boldly,

" Well, you will be sick," she said, and he crept back
into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement.
But he woke early, as an elderly man is apt to do
after broken slumbers, and left his wife still sleeping.
He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the
town as he had been the night before; he even de-
ferred his curiosity for Heine's birth-house to the in-
structive conference which he had with his waiter at
breakfast. After all, was not it more important to
know something of the actual life of a simple common
class of men than to indulge a faded fancy for the
memory of a genius, which no amount of associations
could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter
said he was a Nuremberger, and had learned English
in London where he had served a year for nothing.
Afterward, when he could speak three languages, he

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got a pound a week, which seemed low for so many,
though not so low as the one mark a day which he
now received in Diisseldorf ; in Berlin he paid the ho-
tel two marks a day. "March confided to him his secret
trouble as to tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten
each other as to what a just tip was.

He went to his banker's, and when he came back
he found his wife with her breakfast eaten, and so
eager for the exploration of Heine's birthplace that
she heard with indiiference of his failure to get any
letters. It was too soon to expect them, she said, and
then she showed him her plan, which she had been
working out ever since she woke. It contained every
place which Heine had mentioned, and she was deter-
mined not one should escape them. She examined
him sharply upon his condition, accusing him of hav-
ing taken cold when he got up in the night, and ac-
quitting him with difficulty. She herself was perfectly
well, but a little fagged, and they must have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up
half the little Bolkerstrasse where Heine was bom,
when they stopped across the way from his birth-
house, so that she might first take it all in from the
outside before they entered it. It is a simple street,
and not the cleanest of the streets in a town where
most of them are rather dirty. Below the houses are
shops, and the first story of Heine's house is a butcher
shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the
windows; above, where the Heine family must once
have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker displayed
their signs.

But did the Heine family really once live there?

The house looked so fresh and new that in spite of

the tablet in its front affirming it the poet's birthplace

they doubted; and they were not reassured by the

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people who half halted as they passed, and stared at
the strangers so anomalously interested in the place.
They dismounted and crossed to the butcher shop,
where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but
could not understand their wish to go up-stairs. He
did not try to prevent them, however, and they climbed
to the first floor above, where a placard on the door de-
clared it private and implored them not to knock. Was
this the outcome of the inmate^s despair from the in-
trusion of other pilgrims who had wished to see the
Heine dwelling-rooms ? They durst not knock and ask
so much, and they sadly descended to the ground floor,
where they found a butcher boy of much greater appar-
ent intelligence than the butcher himself, who told them
that the building in front was as new as it looked, and
the house where Heine was really bom was the old
house in the rear. He showed them this house, across
a little court patched with mangy grass and lilac-bushes ;
and when they wished to visit it he led the way. The
place was strewTi both underfoot and overhead with
feathers; it had once been all a garden out to the
street, the boy said, but from these feathers, as well as
the odor which prevailed, and the anxious behavior of
a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was
plain that what remained of the garden was now a
chicken slaughter - yard. There was one well -grown
tree, and the boy said it was of the poet^s time; but
when he let them into the house, he became vague as
to the room where Heine was bom ; it was certain only
that it was somewhere up-stairs and that it could not
be seen. The room where they stood was the frame-
maker^s shop, and they bought of him a small frame
for a memorial. They bought of the butcher's boy,
not so commercially, a branch of lilac; and they came

away, thinking how much amused Heine himself would

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have been with their visit ; how sadly, how merrily he
would have mocked at their effort to revere his birth-
place.

They were too old, if not too wise, to be daunted by
their defeat, and they drove next to the old court gar-
den beside the Rhine where the poet says he used to
play with the little Veronika, and probably did not.
At any rate, the garden is gone ; the Schloss was burned
down long ago; and nothing remains but a detached
tower in which the good Elector Jan Wilhelm, of
Heine^s time, amused himself with his many mechan-
ical inventions. The tower seemed to be in process of
demolition, but an intelligent workman who came down
out of it was interested in the strangers' curiosity, and
directed them to a place behind the Historical Museum
where they could find a bit of the old garden. It con-
sisted of two or three low trees, and under them the
statue of the Elector by which Heine sat with the lit-
tle Veronika, if he really did. A fresh gale blowing
through the trees stirred the bushes that backed the
statue, but not the laurel wreathing the Elector's head,
and meeting in a neat point over his forehead. The
laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the Elector, who
stands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and
resting his baton on the nose of a very small lion, who,
in the exigencies of foreshortening, obligingly goes to
nothing but a tail under the Elector's robe.

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so
much that he raised an equestrian statue to his own
renown in the market-place, though he modestly re-
fused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to the
affection of his subjects. You see him there in a full-
bottomed wig, mounted on a rampant charger with a
tail as big round as a barrel, and heavy enough to keep
him from coming down on his fore legs as long as he

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likes to hold them up. It was to this horse's back that
Heine clambered, when a small boy, to see the French
take formal possession of Diisseldorf ; and he clung to
the waist of the bronze Elector, who had just abdicated,
while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the
balcony of the Eathhaus, and the Electoral arms were
taken down from its doorway.

The Eathhaus is a salad-dressing of German Gk)thic
and French rococo as to its architectural style, and is
charming in its way, but the Marches were in the
market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine*s
boyhood. They felt that he might have been the boy
who stopped as he ran before them, and smacked the
stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an
old market-woman, and then dashed away before she
could frame a protest against the indignity. From
this incident they philosophized that the boys of Diis-
seldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century
as they were at the beginning; and they felt the faaci-
. nation that such a bounteous, unkempt old market-
place must have for the boys of any period. There
were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if
the fruits were meagre that was the fault of the rainy
summer, perhaps. The market-place was very dirty,
and so was the narrow street leading down from it to
the Ehine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along
a slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream
shook in the rapid current, and a long procession of
market-carts passed slowly over, while a cluster of scows
waited in picturesque patience for the draw to open.

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy
to grow up in, and how many privileges it offered,
how many dangers, how many chances for hair-breadth
escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushed
shrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Ehine

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with other boys; and they easily found a leaf -strewn
stretch of the sluggish Diissel in the Public Garden,
where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his life
and saved the kitten's. They were not so sure of the
avenue through which the poet saw the Emperor Na-
poleon come riding on his small white horse when he
took possession of the Elector's dominions. But if it
was that where the statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I.
comes riding on a horse led by two Victories, both poet
and hero are avenged there on the accomplished fact.
Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the bad-
ness of that foolish denhrnal (one of the worst in all
denkmal - ridden Grermany), and the memory of the
singer whom the Hohenzollem family pride forbids
honor in his native place is immortal in its presence.

On the way back to their hotel March made some
reflections upon the open neglect, throughout Germany,
of the greatest German lyrist, by which the poet might
have profited if he had been present. He contended that
it was not altogether an effect of Hohenzollem pride,
which could not suffer a joke or two from the arch-
humorist; but that Heine had said things of Germany
herself which Germans might well have found unpar-
donable. He concluded that it would not do to be per-
fectly frank with one's own country. Though, to be
sure, there would always be the question whether the
Jew-bom Heine had even a step-fatherland in the Ger-
many he loved so tenderly and mocked so pitilessly.
He had to own that if he were a negro poet he would
not feel bound to measure terms in speaking of Amer-
ica, and he would not feel that his fame was in her
keeping.

Upon the whole, he blamed Heine less than Ger-
many, and he accused her of taking a shabby revenge
in trying to forget him ; in the heat of Lis resentment

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that there should be no record of Heine in the city
where he was born, March came near ignoring him-
self the fact that the poet Freiligrath was also bom
there. As for the famous Diisseldorf school of paint-
ing, which once filled the world with the worst art,
he rejoiced that it was now so dead, and he grudged
the glance which the beauty of the new Art Academy
extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and is
so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of
that French supremacy of which in another sort an-
other denkmal celebrates the overthrow. Diisseldorf
is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on horse-
back, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a
second, which the Marches found when they strolled
out again late in the afternoon. It is in the lovely
park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt
in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the
many patriotic monuments of Germany awakened in
them. It had dignity and repose, which these never
had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for
the dying warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture
that their hearts were moved as for the gentle and
mournful humanity of the inscription, which dropped
into equivalent English verse in l^farch^s note-book:

Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous

laurel ;
Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone.

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on
the reverse, of the German soldiers who died heroes
in the war with France, the war with Austria, and
even the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was
just that the ^afternoon should be dim and cold, with
a pale sun looking through a September mist, whicK

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seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the for-
est reaches; for the park was really a forest of the
German sort, as parks are apt to be in Germany. But
it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, and some-
times sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and
said how much seemed to be done in Germany for the
people's comfort and pleasure. In what was their own
explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they were
not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the
children seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all
public things. The Marches met troops of them in
the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the winding
Diissel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and
they foimd them everywhere gay and joyful. But
their elders seemed subdued and were silent. The
strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets
of Diisseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the
part of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed,
and who grinned and cackled at each other like two
children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were in-
deed children of that sad second childhood which one
would rather not blossom back into.

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even wh^n
it is grotesque and shameful, as it so often is; for we
think we can make it right when we choose. But there
is no joking in Germany, between the first and second
childhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there
people do not joke above their breath about kings and
emperors. If they joke about them in print, they take
out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are severely
enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, seri-
ous as well as comic. I^se-majesty is a crime that
searches sinners out in every walk of life, and it is said
that in family jars a husband sometimes has the last
word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming the

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sovereign, and so having her silenced for three months,
at least, behind penitential bars.

" Think," said March, " how simply I coidd adjust
any differences of opinion between us in Diissel-
dorfr

" Don't !" his wife implored, with a burst of feeling
which surprised him. " I want to go home 1'*

They had been talking over their day, and planning
their journey to Holland for the morrow, when it came
to this outburst from her in the last half-hour before
bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.

" What! And not go to Holland? What is to be-
come of my after-cure ?"

" Oh, it's too late for that now. We've used up the
month running about and tiring ourselves to death. I
should like to rest a week — ^to get into my berth on the
Norumbia and rest!"

" I guess the September gales would have something
to say about that."

" I would risk the September gales."

In the morning March came home from his banker's
gay with the day's provisional sunshine in his heart,
and joyously expectant of his wife's pleasure in the
letters he was bringing. There was one from each of
their children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which
March opened and read on the street, so as to intercept
any unpleasant news there might be in them ; there were
two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without open-
ing were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respect-
ively; Mrs. Adding's, from the post-marks, seemed to
have been following them about for some time.

" They're all right at home," he said. " Do see what
those people have been doing."

" I believe," she said, taking a knife from the break-
fast tray beside her bed to cut the envelopes, "that

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you've really cared more about them all along than I
have."

" No, Fve only been anxious to be done with them."

She got the letters open, and, holding one of them
up in each hand, she read them impartially and simul-
taneously; then she flung them both down and turned
her face into her pillow with an impulse of her in-
alienable girlishness. " Well, it is too silly,"

March felt authorized to take them up and read
them consecutively; when he had done so, he did not
differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha had written
to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had
just that evening become engaged ; Mrs. Adding, on her
part, owned a further step, and annoimced her mar-
riage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage
in such matters, Kenby had added a postscript aflSrm-
ing his happiness in unsparing terms, and in Agatha's
letter there was an avowal of like effect from Burna-
my. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would
soon come to regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs.
Adding professed a certain humiliation in having real-
ized that, after all her misgiving about him, Rose seem-
ed rather relieved than otherwise, as if he were glad to
have her off his hands.

"Well," said March, "with these troublesome af-
fairs settled, I don't see what there is to keep us in
Europe any longer, unless it's the consensus of opinion
in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson that we ought to stay the
winter."

" Stay the winter !" Mrs. March rose from her pil-
low, and clutched the home letters to her from the abey-
ance in which they had fallen on the coverlet while she
was dealing with the others. " What do you mean ?"

" It seems to have been prompted by a hint you let
drop, which Tom has passed to Bella and Fulkerson."

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" Oh, but that was before we left Carlsbad !" she
protested, while she devoured the letters with her eyes,
and continued to denounce the absurdity of the writers.
Her son and daughter both urged that now their father
and mother were over there, they had better stay as
long as they enjoyed it, and that they certainly ought
not to come home without going to Italy, where they
had first met, and revisiting the places which they had
seen together when they were young engaged people:
without that their silver wedding journey would not be
complete. Her son said that everything was going well
with Every Other WeeTe, and both himself and Mr.
Fulkerson thought his father ought to spend the winter
in Italy and get a thorough rest. " Make a job of it,
March," Fulkerson wrote, " and have a Sabbatical year
while you're at it. You may not get another."

"Well, I can tell them," said Mrs. March, indig-
nantly, " we shall not do anything of the kind,"

" Then you didn't mean it ?"

" Mean it !" She stopped herself with a look at her
husband, and asked, gently : " Do you want to stay ?"

" Well, I don't know," he answered, vaguely. The
fact was, he was sick of travel and of leisure ; he was
longing to be at homo and at work again. But if there
was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it
were, at a bargain; which could be fairly divided be-
tween them, and leave him the self and her the sacri-
fice, he was too experienced a husband not to see the
advantage of it or to refuse the merit, " I thought you
wished to stay."

" Yes," she sighed, " I did. It has been very, very
pleasant, and, if anything, I have overenjoyed myself.
We have gone romping through it like two young peo-
ple, haven't we ?"

" You have," he assented. " I have always felt the
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weight of my years in getting the baggage registered;
they have made the baggage weigh more every time,"

" And IVe forgotten mine. Yes, I have. But the
years haven't forgotten me, Basil, and now I remem-
ber them. I'm tired. It doesn't seem as if I could
ever get up. But I dare say it's only a mood; it may
be only a cold ; and if you wish to stay, why — ^we will
think it over."

" No, we won't, my dear," he said, with a generous
shame for his hypocrisy if not with a pure generosity.
" I've got all the good out of it that there was in it
for me, and I shouldn't go home any better six months
hence than I should now. Italy will keep for another
time, and so, for the matter of that, \vill Holland."

" No, no !" she interposed. " We won't give up Hol-
land, whatever we do. I couldn't go home feeling that
I had kept you out of your after-cure; and when wo
get there no doubt the sea air will bring rae up so that
I shall want to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seems
so far oflf now! But go and see when the afternoon
train for The Hague leaves, and I shall be ready. My
mind's quite made up on that point."

"What a bimdle of energy!" said her husband,
laughing down at her.

He went and asked about the train to The Hague,
but only to satisfy a superficial conscience; for now
he knew that they were both of one mind about going
home. He also looked up the trains for London, and
found that they could get there by way of Ostend in
fourteen hours. Then he went back to the banker's,
and, with the help of the Paris-New York Chronicle
which he found there, he got the sailings of the first
steamers home. After that he strolled about the streets
for a last impression of Diisseldorf, but it was rather
blurred bv the constantly recurring pull of his thoughts

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toward America, and he ended by turning abruptly at
a certain comer and going to his hotel.

lie found his wife dressed, but fallen again on her
bed, beside which her breakfast stood still untasted;
her smile responded wanly to his brightness. " Fm
not well, my dear," she said. " I donH believe I could
get off to The Hague this afternoon."

" Could you to Liverpool ?" he returned.

•' To Liverpool ?" she gasped. " What do you
mean?"

" Merely that the Cupania is sailing on the twenti-
eth, and I've telegraphed to know if we can get a
room. I'm afraid it won't be a good one, but she's
the first boat out, and — "

" No, indeed, we won't go to Liverpool, and we will
never go home till you've had your after-cure in Hol-
land." She was very firm in this, but she added, ** We
will stay another night here and go to The Hague to-
morrow. Sit down, and let us talk it over. Where were
we?"

She lay down on the sofa, and he put a shawl over
her. " We were just starting for Liverpool."

" No, no, we weren't ! Don't say such things, dear-
est ! I want you to help me sum it all up. You think
it's been a success, don't you ?"

"As a cure?"

" No, as a silver wedding journey ?"

" Perfectly howling."

" I do think we've had a good time. I never ex-
pected to enjoy myself so much again in the world.
I didn't suppose I should ever take so much interest
in anything. It shows that when we choose to get
out of our rut we shall always find life as fresh and
delightful as ever. There is nothing to prevent our
coming any year, now that Tom's shown himself so

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capable, and having another silver wedding journey.
I don't like to think of its being confined to Germany
quite/'

" Oh, I don't know. We can always talk of it as our
German-Silver Wedding Journey."

" That's true. But nobody would understand now-
adays what you meant by German-silver ; it's perfectly
gone out How ugly it was! A sort of greasy yel-
lowish stuff, always getting worn through; I believe
it was made worn through. Aunt Mary had a castor
of it that I can remember when I was a child ; it went
into the kitchen long before I grew up. Would a joke
like that console you for the loss of Italy ?"

" It would go far to do it And as a German-Silver
Wedding Journey, it's certainly been very complete."

" What do you mean ?"

" It's given us a representative variety of German
cities. First we had Hamburg, you know, a great mod-
em commercial centre."

"Yes! Goon!"

" Then we had Leipsic, the academic."

"Yes!"

" Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a German
health resort; then Nuremberg, the mediaeval; then
Ansbach, the extinct princely capital; then Wiirzburg,
the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the litera-
ture of a great epoch ; then imperial Berlin ; then Frank-
fort, the memory of the old free city ; then Diisseldorf ,
the centre of the most poignant personal interest in the
world — I don't see how we could have done better, if
we'd planned it all, and not acted from successive im-
pulses."

" It's been grand ; it's been perfect ! As a German-
Silver Wedding Journey it's perfect — it seems as if it
had been ordered! But I will never let you give up

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Holland ! No, we will go this afternoon, and when I
get to Scheveningen I'll go to bed and stay there till
youVe completed your after-cure."

" Do you think that will be wildly gay for the con-
valescent ?"

She suddenly began to cry, " Oh, dearest^ what
shall we do? I feel perfectly broken down. I^m
afraid I^m going to be sick — and away from home!
How could you ever let me overdo, so ?" She put her
handkerchief to her eyes and turned her face into the
sofa-pillow.

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid
energy and inextinguishable interest had not permitted
a moment's respite from pleasure since they left Carls-
bad. But he had been married too long not to un-
derstand that her blame of him was only a form of
self-reproach for her own self-forgetfulness. She had
not remembered that she was no longer young till she
had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse. The
fact had its pathos and its poetry which no one could
have felt more keenly than he. If it also had its in-
convenience and its danger he realized these, too.

" Isabel," he said, " we are going home."

" Very well, then it will be your doing."

" Quite. Do you think you could stand it as far as
Cologne? We get the sleeping-car there, and you can
lie down the rest of the way to Ostend."

" This afternoon ? Why, I'm perfectly strong; it's
merely my nerves that are gone." She sat up and
wiped her eyes. "But Basil! If you're doing this
for me — "

" I'm doing it for myself," said March, as he went
out of the room.

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the

passage to Dover she suffered so little from the rough

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

weather that she was an example to many robust ma-
trons who filled the ladies* cabin with the noise of
their anguish during the night She would have in-
sisted upon taking the first train up to London, if
March had not represented that this would not expe-
dite the sailing of the Cupania, and that she might
as well stay the forenoon at the convenient railway
hotel and rest. It was not quite his ideal of repose
that the first people they saw in the coffee-room when
they went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose
Adding, who were having their tea and toast and eggs
together in the greatest apparent good-fellowship. He
saw his wife shrink back involuntarily from the en-
counter, but this was only to gather force for it; and
the next moment she was upon them in all the joy of
the surprise. Then March allowed himself to be as
glad as the others both seemed, and he shook hands
with Kenby while his wife kissed Rose; and they all
talked at once. In the confusion of tongues it was
presently intelligible that Mrs. Kenby was going to be
down in a few minutes; and Kenby took March into
his confidence with a smile which was almost a wink
in explaining that he knew how it was with the ladies.
He said that Rose and he usually got down to break-
fast first, and when he had listened inattentively to
Mrs. March's apology for being on her way home he
told her that she was lucky not to have gone to Sche-
veningen, where she and March would have frozen to
death. He said that they were going to spend Septem-
ber at a little place on the English coast near by, where
he had been the day before with Rose to look at lodg-
ings, and where you could bathe all through the month.
He was not surprised that the Marches were going
home, and said, Well, that was their original plan,
wasn't it ?

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Mrs. Kenbjy appearing upon this, pretended to know
better, after the outburst of joyful greeting with the
Marches; and intelligently reminded £enby that he
knew the Marches had intended to pass the winter in
Paris. She was looking extremely pretty, but she
wished only to make them see how well Bose was
looking, and she put her arm round his shoulders as
she spoke. Scheveningen had done wonders for him,
but it was fearfully cold there, and now they were ex-
pecting everything from Westgate, where she advised
March to come, too, for his after-cure: she recollected
in time to say, She forgot they were on their way
home. She added that she did not know when she
should return; she was merely a passenger now; she
left everything to the men of the family. She had, in
fact, the air of having thrown off every responsibilily,
but in supremacy, not submission. She was always
ordering Kenby about; she sent him for her handker-
chief, and her rings which she had left either in the
tray of her trunk or on the pin-cushion or on the wash-
stand or somewhere, and forbade him to come back
without them. He asked for her keys, and then with
a joyful scream she owned that she had left the door-
key in the door and the whole bunch of trunk-keys in
her trunk; and Kenby treated it all as the greatest
joke; Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would
make everything come right, and he had lost that look
of anxiety which he used to have ; at the most he show-
ed a friendly sympathy for Kenby, for whose sake he
seemed mortified at her. He was unable to regard his
mother as the delightful joke which she appeared to
Kenby, but that was merely temperamental; and he
was never distressed except when she behaved with un-
reasonable caprice at Kenby^s cost.

As for Kenby himself, he betrayed no dissatisfac-
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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

tion with his fate to ^larch. He, perhaps, no longer
regarded his wife as that strong character which he
had sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but she
was still the most brilliant intelligence, and her charm
seemed only to have grown with his perception of its
wilful limitations. He did not want to talk about her
so much; he wanted rather to talk about Rose, his
health, his education, his nature, and what was best to
do for him. The two were on terms of a confidence
and affection which perpetually amused Mrs. Kenby,
but which left the sympathetic witness nothing to de-
sire in their relation.

They all came to the train when the Marches started
up to London, and stood waving to them as they pulled
out of the station. " Well, I can't see but that's all
right," he said, as he sank back in his seat with a sigh
of relief. " I never supposed we should get out of their
marriage half so well, and I don't feel that you quite
made the match, either, my dear."

She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys
seemed happy together, and that there was nothing to
fear for Rose in their happiness. He would be as ten-
derly cared for by Kenby as he could have been by his
mother, and far more judiciously. She owned that she
had trembled for him till she had seen them all to-
gether; and now she should never tremble again.

" Well ?" March prompted, at a certain inconclu-
siveness in her tone rather than her words.

" Well, you can see that it isn't ideaV^

" Why isn't it ideal ? I suppose you think that the
marriage of Bumamy and Agatha Triscoe will be ideal,
with their ignorances and inexperiences and illusions."

"Yes! It's the illusions: no marriage can be per-
fect without them, and at their age the Kenbys can't
have them."

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^^ Kenbj is a solid mass of illusion. And I believe
that people can go and get as many new illusions as
they want, whenever they've lost their old ones.''

" Yes, but the new illusions won't wear so well ; and
in marriage you want illusions that will last No ; you
needn't talk to me. It's all very well, but it isn't ideal/*

March laughed. " Ideal 1 What is ideal ?"

" Ooing homer she said, with such passion that he
had not the heart to point out that they were merely-
returning to their old duties, cares, and pains, with the
worn-out illusion that these would be altogether differ-
ent when they took them up again.

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XIX

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took
straightway to her berth when sho got on board the
Cupania, and to her husband's admiration she re-
mained there till the day before they reached New
York. Her theory was that the complete rest would
do more than anything else to calm her shaken nerves ;
and she did not admit into her calculations the chances
of adverse weather which March would not suggest as
probable in the last week in September. The event
justified her unconscious faith. The ship's run was of
unparalleled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of
unparalleled smoothness. For days the sea was as sleek
as oil ; the racks were never on the tables once ; the voy-
age was of the sort which those who make it no more be-
lieve in at the time than those whom they afterward
weary in boasting of it.

The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not
show the slightest curiosity to know who her fellow-
passengers were. She said that she wished to be let
perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for this
reason she forbade March to bring her a list of the pas-
sengers till after they had left Queenstown lest it should
be too exciting. lie did not take the trouble to look
it up, therefore ; and the first night out he saw no one
whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at
breakfast he found himself, to his great satisfaction, at
the same table with the Eltwins. They were so much
at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin took part in

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the talk, and told him how they had Bj^ent the time of
her husband's rigorous after-cure in Switzerland, and
now he was going home much better than they had ex-
pected. She said they had rather thought of spending
the winter in Europe, but had given it up because they
were both a little homesick. March confessed that this
was exactly the case with his wife and himself; and he
had to add that Mrs. March was not very well other-
wise, and he should be glad to be at home on her ac-
count. The recurrence of the word home seemed to
deepen Eltwin's habitual gloom, and Mrs. Eltwin hast-
ened to leave the subject of their return for inquiry
into Mrs. March's condition; her interest did not so
far overcome her shyness that she ventured to propose
a visit to )ier; and March foimd that the fact of the
Eltwins' presence on board did not agitate his wife. It
seemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hoped
he would see all he could of the poor old things. She
asked if he had met any one else he knew, and he was
able to tell her that there seemed to be a good many
swells on board, and this cheered her very much, though
he did not know them; she liked to be near the rose,
though it was not a flower that she really cared for.

She did not ask who the swells were, and March
took no trouble to find out. He took no trouble to
get a passenger-list, and he had the more trouble when
he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished,
as they have a habit of doing, after the first day; the
one that he made interest for with the head steward
was a second-hand copy, and had no one he knew in
it but the Eltwins. The social solitude, however, was
rather favorable to certain other impressions. There
seemed even more elderly people than there were on
the Norumhia; the human atmosphere was gray and
sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the

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outward voyage; there was little talking or laughing
among those autumnal men who were going seriously
and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for the
coming grapple, or necks meekly bowed for the yoke.
They had eaten their cake, and it had been good, but
there remained a discomfort in the digestion. They
sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown
simmier was as dreamlike to each of them as it now
was to him. He hated to be of their dreary company,
but spiritually he knew that he was of it; and he
vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger pas-
sengers. Some matrons who went about clad in furs
amused him, for they must have been unpleasantly
warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope
of being able to tell the customs inspector, with a good
conscience, that the things had been worn would have
sustained one lady draped from head to foot in As-
trakhan.

They were all getting themselves ready for the fray
or the play of the coming winter; but there seemed
nothing joyous in the preparation. There were many
young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there
were not many young men, and such as there were
kept to the smoking-room. There was no sign of flirta-
tion among them ; he would have given much for a mo-
ment of the pivotal girl to see whether she could have
brightened those gloomy surfaces with her impartial
lamp. March wished that he could have brought some
report from the outer world to cheer his wife as he
descended to their state-room. They had taken what
they could get at the eleventh hour, and they had got
no such ideal room as they had in the Norumhia. It
was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room.
It was on the north side of the ship, which is a cold
exposure, and if there had been any sun it could not

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THEIB SILVER WEDDING JOUBNEY

have got into their window, which was half the time
under water. The green waves, laced with foam, hissed
as they ran across the port ; and the electric fan in the
corridor moaned like the wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-
room door open and looked at his wife lying with her
face turned to the wall ; and he was going to withdraw,
thinking her asleep, when she said, quietly: "Are we
going down V*

" Not that I know of,*' he answered, with a gayety
he did not feel. " But I'll ask the head steward.''

She put out her hand behind her for him to take,
and clutched his fingers convulsively. " If I'm never
any better you will always remember this happy sum-
mer, won't you ? Oh, it's been such a happy summer !
It has been one long joy, one continued triumph ! But
it was too late ; we were too old ; and it's broken me."

The time had been when he would have attempted
comfort; when he would have tried mocking; but that
time was long past; he could only pray inwardly for
some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their
barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether
to Providence. He ventured, pending an answer to
his prayers upon the question, "Don't you think I'd
better see the doctor and get you some sort of tonic ?"

She suddenly turned and faced him. " The doctor !
Why, I'm not sicJc, Basil ! If you can see the purser
and get our room changed, or do something to stop those
waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-
eyed window, you can save my life; but no tonic is
going to help me."

She turned her face from him again and buried it

in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the

racing waves and the port that seemed to open and shut

like a weary eye.

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" Oh, go away 1" she implored. " I shall be better
presently, but if you stand there like that — Go and
see if you can't get some other room, where I needn't
feel as if I were drowning all the way over."

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and, hav-
ing once started, he did not stop short of the purser's
oflice. He made an excuse of getting greenbacks for
some English bank-notes, and then he said, casually,
that he supposed there would be no chance of having
his room on the lower deck changed for something a
little less intimate with the sea. The purser was not
there to take the humorous view, but he conceived
that March wanted something higher up, and he was
able to offer him a room of those on the promenade,
where he had seen swells going in and out, for six
himdred dollars. March did not blench, but said he
would get his wife to look at it with him, and then he
went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with him-
self how he should put the matter to her. She would
be sure to ask what the price of the new room would
be, and he debated whether to take it and tell her
some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect
of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance
of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw
six hundred dollars away, but there might be worse
things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at
once it flashed upon him that he had better see the
doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not
some last hope in medicine before he took the desperate
step before him. He turned in half his course and
ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door
of the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped
them all and clutched him to save herself from falling.

" Why, Mr. March !" she shrieked.

"Miss Triscoe!" he returned, in the astonishment

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

which he shared with her to the extent of letting the
shawls he had knocked from her hold lie between them
till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined
her, and in the relief of their common occupation they
contrived to possess each other of the reason of their
presence on the same boat. She had sorrowed over
Mrs. March's sad state, and he had grieved to hear that
her father was going home because he was not at all
well, before they found the general stretched out in his
steamer chair, and waiting with a grim impatience for
his daughter.

" But how is it you're not in the passenger - list ?"
he inquired of them both, and Miss Triscoe explained
that they had taken their passage at the last moment,
too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were
in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the
chance of getting berths. Beyond this she was not
definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy, not
only from her company but from her conversation,
which mystified March through all his selfish preoc-
cupations with his wife. She was a girl who had her
reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and raptur-
ously written them of her engagement, there was a
silence concerning her betrothed that had almost a
positive quality. With his longing to try Miss Tris-
coe upon Mrs. March's malady as a remedial agent, he
had now the desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Tris-
coe's mystery as a solvent. She stood talking to him,
and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the
chair next her father. She said that if he were going
to ask Mrs. March to let her come to her it would not
be worth while to sit down ; and he hurried below.

"Did you get it?" asked his wife, without looking
round, but not so apathetically as before.

" Oh ves. That's all right. But now, Isabel, there's

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something Vve got to tell you. TouM find it out, and
you'd better know it at once."

She turned her face and asked, sternly, "What is

itr

Then he said, with an almost equal severity, " Miss
Triscoe is on board. Miss Triscoe — and — her — ^father.
She wishes to come down and see you.''

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into
shape. " And Bumamy ?"

" There is no Bumamy physically, or so far as I
can make out, spiritually. She didn't mention him,
and I talked at least five minutes with her."

"Hand me my dressing - sack," said Mrs. March,
" and poke those things on the sofa under the berth.
Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain across
that hideous window. Stop 1 Throw those towels into
your berth. Put my shoes and your slippers into the
shoe-bag on the door. Slip the brushes inta that other
bag. Beat the dint out of the sofa-cushion that your
head has made. Now !"

" Then — then you will see her ?"

"fifeeher!"

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and
he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dream-like simul-
taneity. He remembered, as he led the way into his
corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a
basement room.

" Oh, we're in the basement, too ; it was all we could
get," she said, in words that ended within the state-
room he opened to her. Then he went back and took
her chair and wraps beside her father.

He let the general himself lead the way up to his
health, which he was not slow in reaching and was
not quick in leaving. He reminded March of the state
he had seen him in at Wiirzburg, and he said it had

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gone from bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had
taken tp his bed and merely escaped from it with his
life. Then they had tried Scheveningen for a week,
where, he said, in a tone of some injury, they had rather
thought they might find them — the Marches. The air
had been poison to him, and they had come over to Eng-
land with some notion of Bournemouth; but the doctor
in London had thought not, and urged their going home.
" All Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket
in winter,^' he ended.

There had been nothing about Bumamy, and March
decided that he must wait to see his wife if he wished
to know anything, when the general, who had been si-
lent, twisted his head toward him, and said, without
regard to the context, " It was complicated, at Wei-
mar, by that young man in the most devilish way.
Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about — Well,
it came to nothing, after all; and I don't imderstand
how to this day. I doubt if they do. It was some
sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn't consulted in the
matter either way. It appears that parents are not
consulted in these trifling affairs nowadays. '* He had
married hia daughter's mother in open defiance of her
father ; but in the glare of his daughter's wilfulness this
fact had whitened into pious obedience. " I dare say
I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to ap-
prove of the result."

A fancy possessed March that by operation of tem-
peramental laws General Triscoe was no more satisfied
with Bumamy's final rejection than with his accept-
ance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it
might be another thing; but as it stood, March divined
a certain favor for the young man in the general's at-
titude. But the affair was altogether too delicate for

comment; the general's aristocratic frankness in deal-

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ing with it might have gone further if his knowledge
had been greater; but in any case March did not see
how he could touch it. He could only say, He had
always liked Bumamy, himself.

He had his good qualities, the general owned. He
did not profess to imderstand the young men of our
time; but certainly the fellow had the instincts of a
gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, un-
less in that business with that man — ^what was his
name?

" StoUer V^ March prompted. " I donH excuse him
in that, but I don't blame him so much, either. If
punishment means atonement, he had the opportunity
of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon
means expunction, then I don't see why that offence
hasn't been pretty well wiped out."

" Those things are not so simple as they used to
seem," said the general, with a seriousness beyond his
wont in things that did not immediately concern his
own comfort or advantage.

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were
discussing another offence of Bumamy's.

" It wasn't," said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge
through all the minor facts to the heart of the matter,
" that he hadn't a perfect right to do it, if he thought
I didn't care for him. I had refused him at Carlsbad,
and I had forbidden him to speak to me about — on
the subject But that was merely temporary, and he
ought to have known it. He ought to have known
that I couldn't accept him, on the spur of the moment,
that way; and when he had come back, after going
away in disgrace, before he had done anything to jus-
tify himself. I couldn't have kept my self - respect ;
and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he
ought to have seen it. Of course he said afterward

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that he didn't see it. But when — ^when I found out
that she had been in Weimar, and that all the tim^
while I had been suffering there in Carlsbad and
Wiirzburg, and longing to see him and tell him — let
him know how I was really feeling — he was flirting
with that — that girl, then I saw that he was a false
nature, and I determined to put an end to everything.
And that is what I did; and I shall always think I
did right ; and — and — ''

The rest was lost in Agatha's handkerchief, which
she put up to her eyes. Mrs. March watched her from
her pillow, keeping the girl's imoccupied hand in her
own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past suf-
ficiently to allow her to be heard.

Then she said, '* Men are very strange — ^the best of
them. And from the very fact that he was disap-
pointed, he would be all the more apt to rush into a
flirtation with somebody else."

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a
face that had certainly not been beautified by grief.
" I didn't blame him for the flirting, or not so much.
It was his keeping it from me afterward. He ought
to have told me the very first instant we were engaged.
But he didn't. He let it go on, and if I hadn't hap-
pened on that bouquet I might never have known any-
thing about it. That is what I mean by a false nature.
I wouldn't have minded his deceiving me; but to let
me deceive myself — Oh, it was too much !"

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She
was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs. March
said, with a glance, which she did not see, toward the
sofa, " I'm afraid that's rather a hard seat for you.
Won't you—"

" Oh no, thank you ! I'm perfectly comfortable — ^I

like it — if vou don't mind ?"

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Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after
another little delay sighed and said, " They are not
like us, and we cannot help it. They are more tem-
porizing/*

" How do you mean ?" Agatha unmasked again.

" They can bear to keep things better than we can,
and they trust to time to bring them right, or to come
right of themselves."

" I donH think Mr. March would trust things to come
right of themselves !*' said Agatha, in indignant accusal
of Mrs. March's sincerity.

"Ah, that's just what he would do, my dear, and
has done, all along ; and I don't believe we could have
lived through without it: we should have quarrelled
ourselves into the grave !"

"Mrs. March!"

" Yes, indeed. I don't mean that he would ever de-
ceive me. But he would let things go on, and hope
that somehow they would come right without any
fuss."

"Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive
themselves ?"

" I'm afraid he would — if he thought it would come
right. It used to be a terrible trial to me; and it is
yet, at times when I don't remember that he means
nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other
day in Ansbach — how long ago it seems! — he let a
poor old woman give him her son's address in Jersey
City, and allowed her to believe he would look him
up when we got back and tell him we had seen her.
I don't believe, unless I keep right round after him,
as we say in 'New England, that he'll ever go near the
man."

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, " That is a very
diflFerent thing."

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" It isn^t a different kind of thing. And it shows
what men are — ^the sweetest and best of them^ that is.
They are terribly apt to be easy-going."

" Then you think I was all wrong ?" the girl asked,
in a tremor.

"No, indeed! You were right, because you really
expected perfection of him. You expected the ideal.
And that's what makes all the trouble in married life :
we expect too much of each other — ^we each expect more
of the other than we are willing to give or can give.
If I had to begin over again, I should not expect any-
thing at all, and then I should be sure of being radiant-
ly happy. But all this talking and all this writing
about love seems to turn our brains ; we know that men
are not perfect, even at our craziest, because women are
not, but we expect perfection of them ; and they seem
to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep on
after we are in love just as we were before we were
in love, and take nice things as favors and surprises,
as we did in the beginning ! But we get more and more
greedy and exacting — "

" Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him
to tell me everything after we were engaged V^

" No, I don't say that. But suppose he hnd put it
off till you were married?" Agatha blushed a little,
but not painfully. " Would it have been so bad ? Then
you might have thought that his flirting up to the last
moment in his desperation was a very good joke. You
would have understood better just how it was, and it
might even have made you fonder of him. You might
have seen that he had flirted with some one else because
he was so heart-broken about you."

" Then you believe that if I could have waited till
— ^till — But when I had found out, don't you see I
couldnH wait ? It would have been all very well if I

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hadn't known it till then. But as I did know it —
DonH you see ?"

"Yes, that certainly complicated it>" Mrs. March
admitted. "But I donH think, if he'd been a false
nature, he'd have owned up as he did. You see, he
didn't try to deny it ; and that's a great point gained."

"Yes, that is true," said Agatha, with conviction.
" I saw that afterward. But you don't think, Mrs.
March, that I was unjust or — or hasty ?"

"JVo, indeed! You couldn't have done differently
under the circumstances. You may be sure he felt that
— ^he is so unselfish and generous — " Agatha began to
weep into her handkerchief again ; Mrs. March caressed
her hand. " And it will certainly come right if you
feel as you do."

" No," the girl protested. '* He can never forgive
me; it's all over; everything is over. It would make
very little difference to me what happened now — if
the steamer broke her shaft or anything. But if 1
can only believe I wasn't unjust — ^"

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had be-
haved with absolute impartiality; and she proved to
her by a process of reasoning quite irrefragable that
it was only a question of time, with which place had
nothing to do, when she and Bumamy should come
together again, and all should be made right between
them. The fact that she did not know where he was,
any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do
with the result; that was a mere detail which would
settle itself. She clinched her argument by confess-
ing that her own engagement had been broken off,
and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had
to do was to keep willing it, and waiting. There was
something very mysterious in it.

" And how long was it till — " Agatha faltered.

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" Well, in our case it was two years."

" Oh !" said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to re-
assure her.

" But our case was very peculiar. I could see after-
ward that it neednH have been two months, if I had
been willing to acknowledge at once that I was in the
wrong. I waited till we met."

" If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write,"
said Agatha. " I shouldn't care what he thought of
my doing it."

" Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were
wrong."

They remained talking so long that March and the
general had exhausted all the topics of common inter-
est, and had even gone through those they did not
care for. At last the general said, " I'm afraid my
daughter will tire Mrs. March."

" Oh, I don't think she'll tire my wife. But do you
want her ?"

" Well, when you're going down."

" I think I'll take a turn about the deck and start
my circulation," said March, and he did so before he
went below.

He found his wife up and dressed and waiting pro-
visionally on the sofa. " I thought I might as well
go to lunch," she said, and then she told him about
Agatha and Bumamy, and the means she had employed
to comfort and encourage the girl. " And now, dear-
est, I want you to find out where Bumamy is and give
him a hint You will, won't you ? If you could have
seen how unhappy she was !"

^'I don't think I should have cared, and I'm cer-
tainly not going to meddle. I think Bumamy has
got no more than he deserved, and that he's well rid
of her. I can't imagine a broken engagement that

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would more completely meet my approval. Xs tHo
case stands, they have ray blessing."

^^ Don't say that, dearest! You know you don^t
mean it."

"I do ; and I advise you to keep your hands off.
YouVe done all and more than you ought to propitiate
Miss Triscoe. YouVe offered yourself up, and youVe
offered me up — "

" No, no, Basil ! I merely used you as an illustra-
tion of what men were — the best of them."

"And I can't observe," he continued, "that any
one else has been considered in the matter. Is Miss
Triscoe the sole sufferer by Bumamy's flirtation?
What is the matter with a little compassion for the
pivotal girl ?"

" Now, you know you're not serious," said his wife ;
and though he would not admit this, he could not be
seriously sorry for the new interest which she took in
the affair. There was no longer any question of chang-
ing their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the
excitement she did not go back to her berth after lunch,
and she was up later after dinner than he could have
advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her lib-
eration from her hypochondria she began also to make
a comparative study of the American swells, in the light
of her late experience with the German highhotes. It
is true that none of the swells gave her the opportunity
of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had
done. They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where,
after he thought she could bear it, March told her how
near he had come to making her their equal by an out-
lay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at
the thought; but she contended that in their magnifi-
cent exclusiveness they could give points to European
princes; and that this showed again how when Amer-
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icans did try to do a thing thej beat the world. AgHtha
Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know
them; they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke
of them as ^^ rich people/' and she seemed content to
keep away from them with Mrs. March and with the
shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March
sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Elt-
win. General Triscoe had his own friends in the smc^-
ing^room, where he held forth in a certain comer on
the chances of the approaching election in New York,
and mocked their incredulity when he prophesied the
success of Tammany and the return of the King.
March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the
general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of
the Ohioan into his own younger years in Indiana,
and he was amused and touched to find how much
the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had
known. The conditions had changed, but not so much
as they had changed in the East and the farther West.
The picture that the major drew of them in his own
region was alluring; it made March homesick; though
he knew that he should never go back to his native
section. There was the comfort of kind in the major;
and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, which
March liked; he liked also the meekness which had
come through sorrow upon a spirit which had once been
proud.

They had both the elderly man^s habit of early ris-
ing, and they usually found themselves together wait-
ing impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuously bad,
which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half-
past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line dis-
couraging to people of their habits. March admired the
vileness of the decoction, which he said could not be

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got anywhere out of the British Empire, and he asked
Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instant-
ly on the Channel boat they had dropped to it and to
the sour, heavy, sodden British bread, from the spirited
and airy Continental tradition of coffee and rolls.

The major confessed that he was no great hand to
notice such things, and he said he supposed that if
the line had never lost a passenger, and got you to
New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it
pleased; he surmised that if they could get their air-
ing outside before they took their coffee, it would give
the coffee a chance to taste better; and this was what
they afterward did. They met, well-buttoned and well-
muffled up, on the promenade when it was yet so early
that they were not at once sure of each other in the
twilight, and watched the morning planets pale east
and west before the sun rose. Sometimes there were
no paling planets and no rising sun, and a black sea,
ridged with white, tossed under a low dark sky with
dim rifts.

One morning they saw the sun rise with a serenity
and majesty which it rarely has outside of the theatre.
The dawn began over that sea which was like the
rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage,
under long mauve clouds bathed in solemn light.
Above these, in the pale, tender sky, two silver stars
hung, and the steamer^s smoke drifted across them
like a thin, dusky veil. To the right a bank of dun
cloud began to bum crimson, and to bum brighter till
it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeous rugosities
fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth of autumnal
shrubs. The whole eastern heaven softened and flush-
ed through diaphanous mists; the west remained a
livid mystery. The eastern masses and flakes of cloud

began to kindle keenly ; but the stars shone clearly, and

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then one star, till the lawny pink hid it All the zenitli
reddened, but still the sun did not show except in the
color of the brilliant clouds. x\t last the lurid horizoii
began to burn like a flame-shot smoke, and a fiercely
bright disk edge pierced its level and swiftly defined
itself as the sun's orb.

lifany thoughts went through March's mind; some
of them were sad, but in some there was a touch of
hopefulness. It might have been that beauty which
consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself,
if no longer young, a part of the young inmiortal frame
of things. His state was indefinable, but he longed to
hint at it to his companion.

" Yes,'' said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh. '^ I
feel as if I could walk out through that brightness
and find her. I reckon that such hopes wouldn't be
allowed to lie to us ; that so many ages of men couldn't
have fooled themselves so. I'm glad I've seen this."
He was silent, and they both remained watching the
rising sim till they could not bear its splendor. " Now,"
said the major, " it must be time for that mud, as you
call it." Over their coffee and crackers at the end of
the table which they had to themselves, he resimied.
" I was thinking all the time — ^we seem to think half
a dozen things at once, and this was one of them — about
a piece of business I've got to settle when I reach home;
and perhaps you can advise me about it; you're an
editor. I've got a newspaper on my hands; I reckon
it would be a pretty good thing, if it had a chance;
but I don't know what to do with it. I got it in trade
with a fellow who has to go West for his lungs, but
he's staying till I get back. \Miat's become of that
voung chap — ^what's his name? — that went out with
us?"

" Bumamy ?" prompted March, rather breathlessly.
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"Yes. Couldn't he toehold of it? I rather liked
him. He's smart, isn't he ?"

" Very," said March. " But I don't know where he
is. I don't know that he would go into the country.
But he might, if—"

They entered provisionally into the case, and for
argument's sake supposed that Bumamy would take
hold of the major's paper if he could be got at. It
really looked to March like a good chance for him, on
Eltwin's showing; but he was not confident of Bur-
namy's turning up very soon, and he gave the major
a pretty clear notion why by entering into the young
fellow's history for the last three months.

" Isn't it the very irony of fate ?" he said to his wife
when he found her in their room with a cup of the same
mud he had been drinking and reported the facts to her.

" Irony ?" she said, with all the excitement he could
have imagined or desired. " Nothing of the kind. It's
a leading, if ever there was one. It will be the easiest
thing in the world to find Bumamy. And out there
she can sit on her steps !"

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through
the hypothesis of Bumamy's reconciliation and mar-
riage with Agatha Triscoe, and their settlement in
Major Eltwin's town under social conditions that im-
plied a habit of spending the summer evenings on their
front porch. While he was doing this she showered
him with questions and conjectures and requisitions in
which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore
saved him from the instant devotion of all his energies
to a world-wide inquiry into Bumamy's whereabouts.

The next moming he was up before Major Eltwin
got out, and found the second -cabin passengers free
of the first -cabin promenade at an hour when their
superiors were not using it. As he watched these in-

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feriors, decent-looking, well-<;lad men and women, &i-
joying their privilege with a furtive air, and with
stolen glances at him, he asked himself in what sort
he was their superior till the inquiry grew painfuL
Then he rose from his chair, and made his way to the
place where the material barrier between them was
lifted, and interested himself in a few of them who
seemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on
the terms made. A figure seized his attention with a
sudden fascination of conjecture and rejection : the fig-
ure of a tall young man who came out on the promenade,
and, without looking round, walked swiftly away to the
bow of the ship, and stood there looking down at the
water in an attitude which was bewilderingly familiar.
His movement, his posture, his dress even was that of
Bumamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure,
felt a sickening repulsion in the notion of his presence.
It would have been such a cheap performance on the
part of life, which has all sorts of chances at command,
and need not descend to the poor tricks of second-rate
fiction ; and he accused Bumamy of a complicity in the
bad taste of the affair, though he realized, when he re-
flected, that if it were really Bumamy he must have
sailed in as much unconsciousness of the Triscoes as ho
himself had done. He had probably got out of money
and had hurried home while he had still enough to pay
the second-cabin fare on the first boat back. Clearly
he was not to blame, but life was to blame for such a
shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he
wished to turn from the situation and have nothing to
do with it. He kept moving toward him, drawn by
the fatal attraction, and at a few paces' distance the
young man whirled about and showed him the face
of a stranger.

March made some witless remark on the rapid course
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of the ship as it cut its way through the water of the
bow; the stranger answered with a strong Lancashire
accent ; and in the talk which followed, he said he was
going out to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New
Bedford, and he seemed hopeful of some advice or in-
formation from March; then he said he must go and
try to get his missus out; March understood him to
mean his wife, and he hurried down to his own, to
whom he related his hair-breadth escape from Bumamy.

"I donH call it an escape at all!" she declared.
" I call it the greatest possible misfortune. If it had
been Bumamy we could have brought them together
at once, just when she has seen so clearly that she was
in the wrong and is feeling all broken up. There
wouldn't have been any diiBculty about his being in
the second cabin. We could have contrived to have
them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst
you could have lent him money to pay the difference,
and got him into the first cabin."

" I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room
for him," said March, '* and then he could have eaten
with the swells."

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was
fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously ;
and in the end he retired before the stewardess bring-
ing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling that if
it had not been for his triviality the young Lanca-
shireman would really have been Bumamy.

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Except for the first day and night out from Queens-
town, when the ship rolled and pitched with straining
and squeaking noises, and a thumping of the lifted
screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the
ocean was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which
she swayed with no perceptible motion save from her
machinery.

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after
dark, or in those early hours when March found the
stewards cleaning the stairs and the sailors scouring
the promenades. He made little acquaintance with
his fellow-passengers. One morning he almost spoke
with an old Quaker lady whom he joined in looking
at the Niagara flood which poured from the churning
screws; but he did not quite get the words out On
the contrary, he talked freely with an American who
bred horses on a farm near Boulogne, and was going
home to the Horse Show ; he had been thirty-five years
out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee
accent in all its purity, and was the most typical-look-
ing American on board. Now and then March walked
up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of
the usual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather
flavorless ; at times he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked
agreeably, but only about business; and he philoso-
phized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed
so often without philosophy. He made desperate at-
tempts at times to interest himself in the pool-selling

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in the smoking-room where the betting on the ship^s
wonderful run was continual.

He thought that people talked less and less as they
drew nearer home; but on tlie last day out there was
a sudden expansion, and some whom he had not spoken
with voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, soft air
was like midsummer ; the water rippled gently, without
a swell, blue imder the clear sky, and the ship left a
wide track that was silver in the sun. There were
more sail; the first and second class baggage was got
up and piled along the steerage deck.

Some people dressed a little more than usual for
the last dinner which was earlier than usual, so as to
be out of the way against the arrival which had been
variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty. An
indescribable nervousness culminated with the appear-
ance of the customs officers on board, who spread their
papers on cleared spaces of the dining-tables, and sum-
moned the passengers to declare that they had noth-
ing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like
thieves at the dock.

This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made
her way up the Narrows and into the North River,
where the flare of lights from the crazy steeps and
cliflFs of architecture on the New York shore seemed
a persistence of the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics.
March blushed for the grotesque splendor of the spec-
tacle, and was confounded to find some Englishmen
admiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not
the strong point of our race. His wife sat hand in hand
with Miss Triscoe, and from time to time made him
count the pieces of small baggage in the keeping of
their steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a
sarcastic calm.

The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways

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were lifted to her side; the passengers fumbled and
stumbled down their incline, and at the bottom the
Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of
their son and daughter. They all began talking at
once, and ignoring and trying to remember the Tris-
coes,to whom the young Marches were presented. Bella
did her best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered to
get an inspector for the general at the same time as
for his father. Then March remorsefully remembered
the Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that his son
might get them an inspector too. He foimd the major
already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing
all his pieces after carelessly looking into one: the of-
ficial who received the declarations on board had noted
a Grand Array button like his own in the major's lapel,
and had marked his fellow-veteran's paper with the
mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of
being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less
favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the
hands of their government. When March's own in-
spector came he was as civil and lenient as our hate-
ful law allows; when he had finished March tried to
put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to a just
shame by his refusal of it. The bedroom steward keep-
ing guard over the baggage helped put it together after
the search, and protested that March had feed him so
handsomely that he would stay there with it as long
as they wished. This partly restored March's self-re-
spect, and he could share in General Triscoe's indigna-
tion with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay
duty on his own purchases in excess of the hundred-
dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing,
and they jointly came far within the limit for two.
He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet

old hotel on the way to Stuyvesant Square, quite in

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his own neighborhood, and he quickly arranged for
all the ladies and the general to drive together while
he was to follow with his son on foot and by ear. They
got away from the scene of the customs' havoc while
the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimly lit by
its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the
inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like de-
tails from the victorious army searching for the wound-
ed. His son clapped him on the shoulder when he sug-
gested this notion, and said he was the same old father ;
and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting
influences of the New York ugliness would permit It
was still in those good and decent times, now so remote,
when the city got something for the money paid out to
keep its streets clean, and those they passed through
were not foul, but merely mean. The ignoble effect
culminated when they came into Broadway and found
its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European
metropolis would have been brilliant with life, as un-
peopled as those of a minor country town, while long
processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and wom-
en up and down the thoroughfare amid the deformities
of the architecture.

The next morning the March family breakfasted
late after an evening prolonged beyond midnight in
spite of half -hourly agreements that now they must
really all go to bed. The children had both to recog-
nize again and again how well their parents were look-
ing; Tom had to tell his father about the condition of
Every Other Week; Bella had to explain to her mother
how sorry her husband was that he could not come on
to meet them with her, but was coming a week later
to take her home, and then she would know the reason
why they could not all go back to Chicago with him :
it was just the place for her father to live, for every-

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body to live. At breakfast she renewed the reasoning
with which she had maintained her position the night
before; the travellers entered into a full expression of
their joy at being home again ; March asked what had
become of that stray parrot which they had left in the
tree-top the morning they started ; and Mrs, March de-
clared that this was the last Silver Wedding Journey
she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all
that she had been on the verge of nervous collapse when
she reached the ship. They sat at table till she dis-
covered that it was very nearly eleven o'clock, and said
it was disgraceful.

'Before they rose there was a ring at the door, an<l
a card was brought in to Tom. lie glanced at it, and
said to his father, " Oh yes ! This man has been haunt-
ing the office for the last three days. He's got to leave
to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and
death with him I said he'd probably find you here this
morning. But, if you don't want to see him, I can put
him off till afternoon, I suppose."

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it
quietly and then gave it to his wife. "Perhaps I'd
as well see him ?"

^^ See him!" she returned, in accents in which all
the intensity of her soul was centred. By an effort
of self-control which no words can convey a just sense
of she remained with her children, while her husband,
with a laugh more teasing than can be imagined, went
into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer
as to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard, but
shabby. He made an effort for dignity as well as
gayety, however, in stating himself to March, witli
many apologies for his persistency. But, he said, he
was on his way West, and he was anxious to know

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whether there was any chance of his Kasper Hauser
paper being taken if he finished it np. March would
have been a far harder-hearted editor than he was if
he could have discouraged the suppliant before him.
He said he would take the Kasper Hauser paper and
add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a
thousand words. Then Bumamy's dignity gave way,
if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he
broke down and confessed that he had come home in
the steerage, and was at his last cent beyond his fare
to Chicago. His straw hat looked like a withered leaf
in the light of his sad facts ; his thin overcoat affected
March's imagination as sometliing like the diaphanous
cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resimied for comfort
at the approach of autumn. He made Bumamy sit
down, after he had once risen, and he told him of
Major Eltwin's wish to see him; and he promised to
go round with him to the major's hotel before the Elt-
wins left town that afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs.
March was kept from breaking in upon them only by
the psychical experiment which she was making with
the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window
of the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street.
At the first hint she gave of the emotional situation
which Bumamy was a main part of, her son, with the
brutal contempt of young men for other young men's
love-affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his
mother tell his father there was no need of his coming
down that day, and he left the two women together.
This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole
fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and
brevity, and then to enrich the first outline with in-
numerable details, while they both remained at the
window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely inter-

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vals, with no sense of iteration for either of them, '* I
told her to come in the morning, if she felt like it,
and I know she will. But if she doesn't I shall say-
there is nothing in fate or Providence, either. At any
rate, I'm going to stay here and keep longing for her,
and we'll see whether there's anything in that silly
theory of your father's. I don't believe there is," she
said, to be on the safe side.

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park
gate on Rutherford Place, she saved herself from dis-
appointment by declaring that she was not coming
across to their house. As the girl persisted in com-
ing and coming, and at last came so near that she
caught sight of Mrs. March at the window and nodded,
the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter
and drove her away to her own room, so that no so-
ciety detail should hinder the divine chance. She went
to the door herself when Agatha rang, and then she
was going to open the way into the parlor where March
was still closeted with Bumamy, and pretend that she
had not known they were there. But a soberer second
thought than this prevailed, and she told the girl who
it was that was within and explained the accident of
his presence. "I think," she said, nobly, "that you
ought to have the chance of going away if you don't
wish to meet him."

The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs.
March had noted in her from the first with regard to
what she wanted to do, when Burnamy was in ques-
tion, answered, "But I do wish to meet him, Mrs.
March."

While they stood looking at each other, March came
out to ask his wife if she would see Bumamy, and she
permitted herself so much strategem as to substitute
Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subdu-

492

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THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

ing his proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty hand-
shake.

Half an hour later she thought it time to join the
young people, urged largely by the frantic interest of
her daughter. But she returned from the half-open
door without entering. " I couldn't bring myself to
break in on the poor things. They are standing at
the window together looking over at St. Gteorge's."

Bella silently clasped her hands. March gave a
cynical laugh and said, "Well, we are in for it, my
dear." Then he added, " I hope they'll take us with
them on their Silver Wedding Journey."

'I'M Vf END

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