Their Silver Wedding Journey, V2 ....................................................................................................................1

William Dean Howells .............................................................................................................................1

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They found Burnamy 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 staid 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'slength in his answers about his employer. He would not say

how he liked his work, or how he liked Mr. Stoller; 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 contented herself with that.

The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound down the hillside 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

surrounded 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 cosmopolitan world. Germans in every manner of misfit;

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; Russians in

caftans and Cossacks in Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western Europeans, 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

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 the restaurants across the way. On both sides flashed and

glittered the little shops full of silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, woodcarvings, and all the idle

frippery of wateringplace 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

"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March saw how simplehearted 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 perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. 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 altogether 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 Burnamy 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 thal, and stern, and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of

the signs on Broadway. A large man of 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 American, lounged toward

them with a quill toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He 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

chinbeard, and he wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the crown when he took

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

Stoller 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 Burnamy" found you easy enough?"

"Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his toothpick 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

"Oh, no!" said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been advised; but he said to Burnamy:

"I sha'n't want you again till ten tomorrow morning. Don't let me interrupt you," he added patronizingly to

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

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

"Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy laugh. "His people were German emigrants who settled in

Burnamy spoke with his mind on his FrenchCanadian grandfather, who had come down through Detroit,

when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March answered from her eight generations of New England

ancestry. "Oh, for the West, yes, perhaps," and they neither of them said anything more about Stoller.

In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their arriving baggage, she was so full of her

pentup opinions of Burnamy'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

"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 American in

'L'Etranger' 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 Burnamy, 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 Burnamy 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

"Now," said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think we'd better let it all go till after

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 characteristic 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 groundfloor; 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,

The diningroom was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid rococo sculptures and frescoes,

and the glazed veranda opening by vast windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling 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

"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 we must seem like two fadedin old village photographs. We

"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 difficult,

though whether they were not SouthAmerican remained uncertain; two elderly maiden ladies were

unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and were obviously of a bookclub 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 unassignable 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 sackcoats; she chose to attribute

them, for no reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended to prefer a table full of

Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a

middleaged man of learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him 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

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 peculiar 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, standing

guard over the chasm between. Suddenly he choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up

"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

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

"Oh, yes," he admitted. "The only manners we have at home are black ones. But you mustn't lose courage.

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

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy 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 readingroom, 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 AngloAmerican papers aside with his

elbow, as he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian, Hungarian, German, French,

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

Burnamy 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 Europe, the New

York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From the politic side of his nature, however, he

"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 afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and be a

kind of objectlesson." This term had come up in a recent campaign when some employers, by shutting down

their works, were showing their employees what would happen if the employees voted their political opinions

into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was fond of using it. "I'd like 'em to see the woods

around here, that the city owns, and the springs, and the donkeycarts, and the theatre, and everything, and

"I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements, and show how a town can be carried on when

They had not met the evening before on the best of terms. Stoller had expected Burnamy twentyfour hours

earlier, and had shown his displeasure with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at

Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory 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 off 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

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and Burnamy suffered it submissively until

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

"A living, I suppose. Some of the highclass weeklies feel the competition of the tencent 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."

"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad," Stoller 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 him." 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 Burnamy,

Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the West with the instinct for sordid

prosperity native to their race and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town where

their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could remember his mother helping 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 townspeople. 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 schoolgoing age, she taught him to fight the

Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and mobbed his homecoming; and mocked and

tormented him at playtime 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 terms as "Nix come arouce 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 blacksmith and

wagonmaker. 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 dollar 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 dreamt 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

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 accent, but she

kept silence when her son's wife had 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 staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his financial importance in the community. 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 reaction which

followed he was barely defeated for Congress, 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 bullheaded business ways would bring him to ruin sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors 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 begun 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 mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the

direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near Wurzburg 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 lifelong gluttony, 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 Wurzburg,

for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, to learn the language, which he had

forgotten with such heartburning and shame, and music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father with open threats of running away; and

in his heart he did not altogether blame them. He came away from Wurzburg 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 dearbought 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 stepcountry in

March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor, and when it came his turn to be

prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor

wrote out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of glasses of water at a certain

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

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 'Guten 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 salutations 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 thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of the

Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its steaming waters by irregular impulses into

the air under a pavilion of iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There is an

instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there

was an orchestra already playing; and under 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 interminable line moving on

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 welltodo; 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 beauty and grace rather than the domestic virtues.

There were certain faces, types of discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end. A

young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid SouthAmerican, 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 citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave

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 owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a half

hour before one's turn carne, 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 childish habit of

counting ten between the sips, and of finishing 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, absentmindedly, and this, with

the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but

there were sunny mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the air was almost

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer, whom he had sometimes noted in

the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained

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 Burnamy 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 literary life, and how it differed from the life of a journalist. He asked if he thought

Burnamy 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 Wurzburg; 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

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 fellowcountryman saying good,

morning to them all in English. "Are you going to teach them United States?" he asked of a face with which

"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, here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about dead; then

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

"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 American, to know him. I

"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 off; and we got to

"Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn't an Eastern man you was just with?"

"Well, you do meet everybody here." The Iowan was silent for a moment, as if, hushed by the weighty

thought. "I wish my wife could have seen him. I just want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don't

know what's keeping her, this morning," he added, apologetically. "Look at that fellow, will you, tryin' to get

away from those women!" A young officer 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 caressing 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 Englishman 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 mustaches up at night in

curlpapers, they tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your first glass, yet, Jenny?

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 be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflected

that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who had amused or interested him before she

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other agreeable things in Carlsbad,

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

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 prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow

from the beginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which it had at the midday

dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the concert 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 readingroom, 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 caf� 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 tissuepaper bag

of a gay red color, and you join the other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadowlands, a good mile up the brawling Tepl, before they

join on the right side of the torrent, where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and

rain impartially through upon its army of little tables. By this time the slow omnibus plying 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

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, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of

highwellborns 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, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way

to the Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of

Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carroteating

rabbits, worstedworking cats, dancingbears, and peacocks that strut about the feet of the passers and

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt the farreflected charm of the

crucifixes of the whitehot Italian highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a

mechanical, outdated impulse to get something for the 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 under pentroofs on way side tables; and he waited patiently

at the gate of the flowergardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease from the

businesslike flowerwoman, and feigned a grateful joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him a

"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

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the caf� at last, and a turn of the path brought them to the

prospect of its tables, under the trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters 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

servingmaids, 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

"Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some American Excellencies, and you must

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

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the gallery, and was far beyond hearing 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 breakfasters came up she was ready for their

order, with the pouting pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places. Burnamy 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

"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

"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 without expecting to

equal them in any other way. At Pupp's, if we go to one end of the out door restaurant, 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 three of them. If we go to the other end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only

"Women do nearly everything, here," said Burnamy, impartially. "They built that big new Kaiserbad

"That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn't there anybody of polite interest

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 servinggirls 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 harlequin patches of light and

shade. A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks and

yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sunshot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the publicity,

places for the surlylooking, downfaced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the

dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy 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 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 . . . . Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his

poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a

"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 wellborns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."

"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his wife. " Don't worry about me, Mr. Burnamy. "Why can't we

"We're getting something like it in the roofgardens," 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 burning the life out of

the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up

in such a grove as this. So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the flyline and the

mosquitoline into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came to Europe. I really miss them; it makes me

"But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in 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 bluff." He turned to

Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor: "Isn't Lili rather long? I mean for such a

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted "Fraulein!" 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

"Oh, I think she'll come now," said Burnamy. March protested that he had only been amused at Lili's delay;

but his wife scolded him for his impatience; she begged Burnamy'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 mothers 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 themselves a good deal

on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting from their eyeglasses, and their

hands pressing their swordhilts, they moved between the tables with the gait of tightlaced women.

"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March. "I can see that Europe won't be lost on you in anything.

Oh, who's that?" A lady whose costume expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove

with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. "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

"Those things are too squalid," he said, and she liked him for saying it; she hoped it would not be lost upon

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden off her tray on the stone floor

before her; some of the dishes broke, and the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled

down her hot cheeks. "There! That is what I call tragedy," said March. "She'll have to pay for those things."

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 wellladen trays. She forestalled Burnamy'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

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble international marriages which fill our women

"Oh, come now, Lili!" said Burnamy. "We have queens in America, but nothing so low as princesses. This

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 corner 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 hireling 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

March had begun his breakfast withthe voracious appetite of an early rising invalid. "What coffee!"

"It's said to be made of burnt figs," said Burnamy, from the inexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority

"Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible. But why burnt figs? That seems one of

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 caf� in Carlsbad

"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 personally acquainted with. Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad. I don't wonder

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller 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

'kurgemass'. 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

We'll take Mrs. March," said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt the limitations of a woman's sense

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what he knew about distinctions 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 servinggirls ran

more swiftly to and fro, responding with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of "Fraulein! Fraulein!" 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

Burnamy caught Lili's 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

"Do go and see who it can be!" Mrs. March entreated. "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

"Would it be any better later?" he asked in tern. "He seemed to find you interested."

Her husband laughed. "I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!" he cried, and she saw Burnamy coming

toward them with a young lady, who was nodding to them from as far as she could see them. "This is the easy

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. "Do you know I felt it must be you, all the time!

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

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 ParisNew 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 humbug,, though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told the

walks were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and Burnamy 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

"I shall like your account of it," she answered. "But I'll walk back on a level, if you please."

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 Burnamy 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

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 Burnamy, "and they seem as much interested in everything as they

could have been thirty years ago. They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is

"I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than people were in the last. Perhaps we

"I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keeping 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

"Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh. "But that's where the psychological interest would come

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. "I suppose you've been writing all sorts of

"Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had Mr. Stoller's psychological interests to

"I don't know. He's a lump of honest selfishness. He isn't bad. You know where to have him. He's simple,

"I didn't mean that; but why not? They're not of the same generation, but Stoller isn't modern."

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on March, who had sunk on a

wayside seat, and was mopping his forehead. He saw them, and called up: "Don't wait for me. I'll join you,

"I don't want to lose you," Burnamy 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

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 closeset stems of trees, with their tops

interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely 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 is 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 of the moist,

flowerless earth about their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his countrybred

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 exemption from

care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who

had bidden him goodmorning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and was less intrusive

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 fulfilment of their several prescriptions, had a thin unreality 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 reunion in response to the young man's

longing, her will making itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless telegraphy which love

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 his seat, and

he joined the upward procession of his fellowsick, 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

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss Triscoe told him that he ought to have

been with them for the view from the Hirschensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy

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 Stoller and what sometimes seemed the obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy

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 beyond 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 graceful lines

which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery hat to the point where the pewtop crossed her

elastic waist. One happy morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to walk home

with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment, and almost made him believe she might be

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 storkscissors

in the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could get them. They walked home with

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 Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the storkscissors they had seen in the

window. The gas was out, and the shopman lighted 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

"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humoring his feint. "Shall I put my card in for the man to send

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches

and Burnamy where they sat after supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for the

scissors. Then she and Burnamy 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 refuse the interest Burnamy

made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in. He had to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy

"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of storkscissors?" March demanded, when his wife and he were

"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she began, in a tone which he felt to be wheedling, and she told the

"That was on the ship. And besides, what would 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

"Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we will chaperon them. And I promised

"It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can see something of Carlsbad society."

"But I'm not going!" he declared. "It would interfere 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

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 bathrooms; 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 believed 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.

It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to pay two florins and a half. There must

have been some sort of restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy'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 military

had. The long hall over the bathrooms 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 tightlaced Herr 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 dancingspace. From the gallery above many civilian spectators looked

down upon the gayety, and the dresscoats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to the dancingfloor, and toward ten

o'clock it became rather crowded. A party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic

versions of the waltz. At first they danced with the young men who came with them; but after a while 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 Burnamy, "but I never can like it without an

"No," said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away, "I don't believe papa would, either."

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication 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, Burnamy, 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 unmistakably asking her to dance. She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so

much that she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot her fiftyodd years; she

forgot that she was a mother of grown children and even a motherinlaw; she remembered only the step of

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they were suddenly revolving with the

rest. . . A tide of longforgotten girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it past

the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy. 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; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his knees, and the citizen who had bowled

"Oh, are you hurt?" Mrs. March implored. "I'm sure you must be killed; and I did it! I don't know, what I was

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and congratulation. In the

dressingroom she declared again that she was all right. "How beautifully 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

Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would think of her. "You must tell him I did

"No, I shall not. No one did it," said the girl, magnanimously. She looked down sidelong at her draperies. "I

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his hand and held in place till he could

escape to the men's dressingroom, where he had it pinned up so skillfully 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, that!" she answered carelessly. "That was one of the officers at the ball," and she laughed.

"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 retrospective 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 caf� of the Freundschaftsaal. In the

grounds an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses 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 Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration to propose that they should all three sit together, 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 picture they took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy

"You oughtn't to ask," she returned. "You've no business to have Miss Triscoe's picture, if you must know."

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 that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall we let him keep

Burnamy 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. Adding 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

"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home, and began to put off her things,

with signs of excitement which he could not fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he

His question suggested something of anterior import, 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

He said, lazily: "They seem to be working you for all you're worth. Is that it?"

"No; there is something worse. Something's happened which throws all that quite in the shade. Mrs. Adding

"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 opposite Mr. Kenby on the Norumbia. The mother of the nice

"No, it isn't! Don't say such a thingtill you know!" she cried, with a certain shrillness which warned him of

an unfathomed 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. Kenby's been there, and Now I

won't have you making 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 goodlooking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not for him, I don't believe

"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and she answered him as vehemently:

"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed of themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy!

"Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?" He arrested himself at her threat, and she resumed, after giving

"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

"She refused him," she began again, "although she respects him, because she feels that she ought to devote

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 thirtyfive yet. I don't think she ever cared much for her husband; and she wants

Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequent of men from the most logical and

coherent interpretation to the true intent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely: "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

"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. "Of course she has to know about him,

now." 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

March burst into a laugh. "Well, they haven't been beating about the bush! When I think how Miss Triscoe

has been pursuing Burnamy 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

"I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in 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

"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people," said Mrs. March. "I don't believe he'll

"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I'm not going to have them round in my breadtrough!"

"Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their loveaffairs in their own way. The only one I care

"Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and No, it's horrid, and you can't make it anything

"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

The midday dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and the Marches had the habit of

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

goodlooking, and of a goodbreeding 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

freshwater 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 young girl of a different 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 cucumber 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 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

SouthAmericans, and loudly harangued them in SouthAmerican 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.

Amidst 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 fondness 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 romances which did not in any wise eventuate. Carlsbad 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 summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the 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 my 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 complement

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 charmingalmost 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 effect 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 upland slopes, with villas

and long curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall. "It would be about as offensive to have a

loveinterest that one personally knew about intruded here," he said, "as to have a twospanner carriage

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she answered: "See that handsome young Greek

"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 Burnamy, and I 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 besides

themselves, which they were no more capable of than so many lunatics. 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 wayside shrine? Or a whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside

raspberries to touch his hat and say goodmorning? Or those preposterous maidens sprinkling linen on the

grass from wateringpots while the skies were full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great

made a horseshoe. Or the monument of the young warriorpoet Koerner, with a gentlelooking girl and her

mother reading and knitting on a bench before it? These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could

lovers really care for them? A peasant girl flung down on the grassy roadside, fast asleep, while her

yokefellow, 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 chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond the Tepl, and enlisting

the interest of all the neighbors; the negro doorkeeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our

Southern English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon stillness in the

woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts. Burnamy as a young poet might hate

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

A day or two after Mrs: March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her husband to revere a certain

magnificent blackamoor whom be had discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the

Schlossberg, where he performed the function 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. They took a roundabout

way through a street entirely of villapensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not n

hotel; but these 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 outdoors; 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 inconsistency in complaining of lovers while he was willing 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 they agreed, they had come to the 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 bystanders. 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 remained

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 relaxed; the footman drooped, and even wandered aside. There came a moment

when at some signal the carriage drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the stableyard;

it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention. Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off.

At last an indescribable significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in a high hat and

dresscoat 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 out of the hotelyard, down the street, round

the corner, out of sight. The man in the tall hat and dresscoat went in; the official group at the threshold

dissolved; the statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of Coburg, or Montenegro, or

"Not at all! I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Think how near we came to seeing them!"

"I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them. But to hang round here in this plebeian abeyance, and then to

be defeated and defrauded at last! I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?"

"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 nature 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!"

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 Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of

Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and all the fleeting

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed 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 countryman. It

was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious recognition. "Hello! Most of the

Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanging round here for a sight of these kings. Well, we 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 summer, and yet you don't seem to get enough of 'em. Think it's human nature, or did it get so ground

"That's very much what I've been asking myself," said March. "Perhaps it's any kind of show. We'd wait

"I guess you're right." The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March's philosophy than March felt himself,

"But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President 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.

"Happy to meet you, Mrs. March," said the Iowan. "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

understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would rather be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for

"Indeed, indeed," said the lady, "I'd like to see a king too, if it didn't take all night. Goodevening," she said,

turning her husband about with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March, and was not

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: "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

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad 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 moment

before mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young 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 plebeianlooking than their retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed as

"It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes," March declared, "to look their own consequence

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now become Highhote, which was so much

more descriptive that they had permanently 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 King 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 readingroom, 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 moderated approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which

Americans are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiablelooking

youth in spectacles as the sovereign she was ambuscading. Then no appeal to her principles could keep her

from peeping through the readingroom door into the rotunda, where the King graciously but speedily

dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator. She was destined to see him

so often afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and supping by that of the simple

potentate, who had his meals in one of the public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sackcoats like

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a successful

rebellion, was at the opera one night with some of his faithful followers. Burnamy 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 advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father

"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 paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he reads in print, that he

Burnamy 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

"Thank you. He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant to you if they went, too."

"He thought," Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, "that we might all go to the opera, and

He named the only place in Carlsbad where yon can sup so late as ten o'clock; as the opera begins at six, and

"Oh!" said Mrs. March. "I don't know how a late supper would agree with my husband's cure. I should have

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much that March took his part, as perhaps 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, Burnamy 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

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 began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a five

o'clock supper at the TheatreCaf� 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 him. But still she

liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best seat; Burnamy and Stoller 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. Stoller 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 Burnamy'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 contributor 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 Stoller's presence. 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

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 certain military

figures in the boxes opposite, and certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to Mrs.

March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was very simple, but of a touch which saved

"Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the orchestra?" asked Burnamy. "He's ninetysix

years old, and he comes to the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises, and sleeps

"How dear!" said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with her glasses, while many other glasses

"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 inflexible 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

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye about the theatre to cap it, he

caught sight of that other potentate. He whispered joyfully, "Ah! We've got two kings here tonight," and he

indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of Servia sat, the wellknown face of the

"He isn't badlooking," said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe. "I've not seen many kings in exile;

a matter of a few Carlist princes and exsovereign 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 suppose he has his

"Dream! " said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes. "He's dead sure of it."

"Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he was called back to England, or Napoleon

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 understand it, was bad for all classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people

have now had three years of selfgovernment; 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 oppressed. When he's in power again,

he will be as subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an idolatrous following perfectly

"We've only begun," said the general. "This kind of king is municipal, now; but he's going to be national.

"The only thing like it," March resumed, too incredulous of the evil future to deny himself the aesthetic

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

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 vindictive

"Yes," said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March. "That's what we must ask ourselves 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 unjust 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

"Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose. But if a man came to you, and offered to be

your slave for a certain considerationsay a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't too

hardshould you feel it morally right to accept the offer? I don't say think it right, for there might be a kind

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 a 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 TheaterCaf�, where

the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an exemplary drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently

gaseous waters of Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badness which delights in a supper at Schwarzkopf's, and

even these are glad of the drawn curtains which hide their orgy from the chance passer.

The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselves in a mutual purpose not to be

tempted to eat anything which was not strictly 'kurgemass'. 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 Burnamy and Miss

Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the

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 darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the

night with lamplit 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 impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the crucifix's

vigil. He submitted it to her; and they remained 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

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. Stoller's

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the threshold and bowed them into a

pretty inner room, with a table set for their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly. He

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 going herself to sit next to March, whom she said she had

not been able to speak a word to the whole evening. But she did not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find

how soon he dropped out of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the table,

dropped into it. He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose instinct of a greater worldly 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

Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments 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 Burnamy, "What's

the reason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking about?"

"To Engelhaus? I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned," answered Burnamy; but he refused the

"Yes." General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, "It was the hold of an old robber baron;

"Isn't tomorrow our 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

"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 effect of

using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor. They were six, and two carriages would take them: a

twospanner for four, and a one spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home in time

Stoller asserted himself to say: "That's all right, then. I want you to be my guests, and I'll see about the

"Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will get them."

"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely, he can't like that man!" said Mrs.

"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The general seems to me, capable of letting even an enemy serve his

"And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that she wished to go."

"He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that he would be with Miss Triscoe the whole

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the onespanner, and the others followed in the twospanner, 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

onespanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat of the twospanner 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 bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with

Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our workingclasses, but did not know what to do with his scorn

of the vulgarity and venality of their employers. He accused some of Stoller's most honored and envied

capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier than the votingcattle whom they bought

"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 columns 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

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while he read, and keep him up to the work,

and he ignored the Marches so entirely that they began in selfdefence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the breezy upland where the great

highroad 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 whitishblue and grew straight as stalks of grain; and now on

either side the farms opened under 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 ribands 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 carts with heavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and

the men giving themselves the lighter labor of ordering 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 sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were

dimmed in the forests on the faroff mountains. Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the

valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the distant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills,

with a sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed 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 absentminded 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 chance to show you. They got my instructions over there to

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 meadows,

who were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the twospanner 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

"I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl was very exacting."

"Why," said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deception in men too much to tolerate it

at all. Of course, in this case, he didn't deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"

"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 worse. It showed something weak, something cowardly in him."

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. "I suppose it did. But don't you think it's rather rough, expecting us to

"Yes, it is," she assented. "That is why I say she was too exacting. But a man oughn't to defend him."

He turned to look back at the twospanner; it was rather far behind, and he spoke to their driver bidding him

go slowly till it caught up with them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it 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 detail. The detached mound of

rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst of the plain, and commanded the highways in every

"I believe," Burnamy 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

onespanner, if his castle was in good repair and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on

a strike, probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but nonunion crossbowmen."

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, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can have

"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will. And perhaps if I thought better of

They turned a corner 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 lilacbushes, 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 simple 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 underground, and a cistern which once

From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every direction, and could bring a

merchant train to, with a shaft from a crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General

Triscoe'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 difference in method than anything else that

distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now. What was the essential difference, between

taking tribute 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 proof of progress that they no longer fought the

"I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night," said Miss Triscoe, "that people are kept on the docks now for hours,

"It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times," her husband resumed. "But I'm glad the travellers make

"It all comes round to the same thing at last," said General Triscoe. "Your precious humanity"

"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road. He thinks he is finding his way out,

Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by which

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner 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 carpetlike fields

and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into the distance. "I don't suppose,"

Burnamy said, "that life ever does much better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and

"It would spoil the flowers," she said, looking down at them in her belt. She looked up and their eyes met.

"I wonder," he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling of dread when we are happy?"

"Yes. Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must be for the worse."

"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological weather, and could know twentyfour

hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and

"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

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller looking down at them, with a slant of

the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief. "Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" 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

"All right," said Burnamy, 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 account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this

one built only a few years before. Then 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 fortified themselves for it

They were served by a little hunchback maid; and she told them who lived in the chief house of the village.

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,

sleepyeyed puppies which he held up, with an arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the

"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone," he refused; and then he was about

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

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago,

indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is

threecornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and

each of the three sidealtars. 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,

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

neglected 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 be led

them with less apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the figure of

Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much celebrated in terracotta 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

understand 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;

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 selfanalysis 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 merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of

"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had done

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."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for the

"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts of her dress as a

"Well," she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both 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

She laughed, and held both gloves up. "No wonder! I had it all the time. Thank you ever so much."

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said,

"Did that absurd creature," she apostrophized her husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival at

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller 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 writingdesk when Burnamy came in, and

the young man did not sit down after putting his letters 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."

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain articles were strongly circumscribed

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, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as the praise of

municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and gathering drops of perspiration on his upper

lip, while Burnamy 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 want city government carried on on business principles, by the

people, for the people. I 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 Burnamy's pale face. "What's the matter with

"Do you mean to tell me it is"he could not bring himself to use the word"what they say?"

"I suppose," said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may call municipal socialism."

"It's a lie!" Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step backward.

"Look out!" shouted Burnamy. "You never asked me anything about it. You told me what you wanted done,

and I did it. How could I believe you were such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were

talking about?" He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry. You can make it right with the

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. "I can take care of myself, young man. How

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he came dragging himself toward them

with such a haggard air that Mrs. March called, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's the

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 coffeeonly 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

offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been rejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to say

The water came into his eyes. "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March! I can't stand it. But you won't, when

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing 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 fellow was forced to ask, "Well, what do you think, Mr. March?"

"I think, I behaved badly," said Burnamy, 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

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes; but her husband only looked the

He asked gently, "Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a justification."

Burnamy laughed forlornly. "It certainly wouldn't justify me. You might say that it made the case all the

worse for me." March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on. "But I didn't suppose they would be onto him so

quick, or perhaps at all. I thoughtif I thought anythingthat it would amuse some of the fellows in the

office, who know about those things." He paused, and in March's continued silence he went on. "The chance

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 be could have ever got forward in politics; he's too honestor 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

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. When 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 nightmare it's been! Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've

ruined myself, too. I've spoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain toto the people I want to

have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the thief I am. Goodby!" He jumped to his feet, and put out

"Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleveno'clock train. I don't think I shall see you again." He clung to

her hand. "If you see General TriscoeI wish you'd tell them I couldn'tthat I had tothat I was called

away suddenlyGoodby!" He pressed her hand and dropped it, and mixed with the crowd. Then he came

suddenly back, with a final appeal to March: "Should youdo you think I ought to see Stoller, andand tell

"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

"Oh, yes, I know what you will say. But I should have tempered justice with mercy."

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, 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 confidently 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 England 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 always something peculiar in the poor boy's

He would confess no more than that there ought to have been. "I don't see how he could stagger through with

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said: "I wonder how far it has gone with

"Don't laugh! It"s wicked to laugh! It's heartless!" she cried, hysterically. "What will he do, poor fellow?"

"I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow. But, at any rate, he's doing the right thing in going to

Burnamy fond 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

This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome. He answered not much less brutally, "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

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog's when he snarls. "You want to get back!"

"No," said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke. "I don't want to get back. Nothing

"Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, 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

nightand you can do it for me. I know 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

"You kin," Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted Hoosier, in the stress of his

anxiety. "I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy." He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands,

and pointed out a succession of marked passages. "There! And here! And this place! Don't you see how you

could make out that it meant something 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 impossibly 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 countingroom to see 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 Burnamy. If it could be done, it would enable him to make Stoller the reparation he

longed to make him more than anything else in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gently, almost

tenderly, "It might be done, Mr. Stoller. But I couldn't do it. It wouldn't be honestfor me."

"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it into Burnamy's face. "Honest, 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

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened 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 Burnamy had let him imply. He braved Stoller's onset, and he left his presence

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's pleasure, and in the selfreproach 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 twoseated bower where they

breakfasted at their hotel when they did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't 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 pour

"What do you call a nice time?" he temporized, not quite able to resist her gayety.

"Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass? I took cold in that old church, and the tea at that

restaurant must have been brewed in a brass kettle. I suffered all night from it. And that ass from Illinois"

"Oh, poor papa! I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have gone in the twospanner with him and

"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?"

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied 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, "I don't know what

"Oh, there's nothing like American food!" said his daughter, with so much conciliation that he looked up

But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by the approach of a servingmaid,

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

Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy'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 before 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.

Burnamy, which I think you'd better see." She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as

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

"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 Stoller?"

"He saidhe said yesterdaysomething about being 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

"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

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

"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she returned; 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

Her father could not say that it was not. But he could and did say, very sceptically: "Stuff! Now, see here,

"You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear," said her father, gently. "You've no right to give yourself

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 in this

matterand mine. And you may as well understand 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

"No, no! He oughtn't to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn't have written to you, though, papa"

"Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason why we should let it be understood that he has written 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

"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 Burnamy

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. "You knew," she said, "that Mr. Burnamy had left

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to trust her husband's poverty of

invention. 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

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. "You think he's behaved badly."

"I think he's behaved foolishlyyouthfully. But I can understand how strongly he was tempted. He could say

March added: "Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something that disposes me to look at his

performance in a friendlier light. It's something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of

Burnamy'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 Burnamy's injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion

The general grunted again. "Of course he had to refuse, and he has behaved like a gentleman so far. But that

"No," said March. "It's a tough nut for the casuist 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

"Ah, very likely," said her husband. "The question is about Burnamy's part in giving him his deserts; he had

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eyeglasses, and left the subject as of no concern to

him. "I believe," he said, rising, "I'll have a look at some of your papers," and he went into the readingroom.

"Now," said Mrs. March, "he will go home and poison that poor girl's mind. And, you will have yourself to

"Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?" he teased; but he was really too sorry for the whole affair,

The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for his morning walk he saw him come

out of the readingroom and take his way down the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and

reported Burnamy's behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his making the best of a bad business in

refusing to help Stoller out of it, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad

"Now, you know all about it," he said at the end, "and I leave the whole thing to you. If you prefer, you can

"I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that way? I am satisfied now."

Instead of Burnamy, 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 conclusions.

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 which Rose was

proud to bear him company. He was patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he

learned to distinguish between the earnest 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 painful stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the

matter of the womananddog 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

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was troubled by his friend's apparent

acceptance 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 riverside, 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 ventured, "that the man had better be cutting the wheat, and letting

"Well, I don't know. There are more of them; and he wouldn't 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?"

"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

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 justice that Rose suffered a humiliation from her championship, 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

"Oh, I'm not his only ideal," March protested. "He adores Kenby too, and every now and then he brings me to

"Oh, hold on, now! It isn't a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don't say Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a

stepfather. I merely want you to understand 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

"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

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 halfhour, with the charm which

German 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 them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as

Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted. "There's your chance, Rose. Why

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly attacked her husband in his behalf.

Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation in my phrasebook 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 objectlesson of this sort what spoiled children of our civilization

"Oh, there is no civilization but ours," said Mrs. March, in a burst of vindictive patriotism. "I am more and

"Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us in the conviction that America is the

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 under the trees below clapped and cheered.

"That was opportune of the band," said March. "It must have been a telepathic impulse from our patriotism in

the director. But a pot pourri of American 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."

"Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism," said Mrs. March; and she added: "But

whether we have any national melodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep them soaking!"

"No, we certainly don't," he assented, with such a wellstudied effect of yielding to superior logic that Mrs.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, "I hope Rose isn't acting on my suggestion?"

"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 lesemajesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight. He's queer."

"He's good," the mother admitted. "As good as the day's long. He's never given me a moment's troublebut

"Oh, I do understand!" Mrs. March returned. "By his innocence, you mean. That is the worst of children.

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

"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 supposed he might simply have exhausted his questionsor my

"No; it goes deeper than that. I think it's Europe that's turned his mind in the direction of reform. At any rate

"No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects 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

"Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing," said the mother, gayly. Rose came shyly back into the room, and she

"They're only a custom, too, Rose,", said March, tenderly. "Like the man resting while the women worked,

"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 enjoying all our uptodate improvements."

There, doesn't that console you?" asked his mother, and she took him away with her, laughing back from the

"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 easygoing, and she

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 fancied so; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in midAugust, but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting up over the

hills that as people went to their breakfasts at the cafes 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 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 barefooted boys and girls with cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers

with cries of "Himbeeren! 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 entreaty, she said, "The queen is here, this morning."

"Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy 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

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 corner of the table.

"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

"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 characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some

pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and gratitude. "I think Miss Triscoe ought to know it. There goes the

wretch, now!" she broke off. "Don't look at him!" She set her husband the example of averting his face from

the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the grove, and looking to the right and left for a

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, umbrella, and handkerchief which the ladies let drop from

"Have I told you anything?" she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn. "Anything that you didn't as good as

"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything," said March, after she left them.

"Wellno. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was about Burnamy and Agatha that she knew. She

"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

"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

"I worry about them, too," said the mother, fondly. "Though there is nothing to worry about," she added.

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 born out there!" sighed her mother); and one from the

son, boasting his wellbeing 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 Week'. There was a line from Fulkerson,

praising the boy's editorial instinct, 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 'Burnamy

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 Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he

could use it in 'Every Other Week'. He had come upon a book about that hapless foundling in Nuremberg,

and after looking up all his traces there he had gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so

pathetically. Burnamy 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 aftercure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place.

"And, not a wordnot a syllableabout Miss Triscoe!" cried Mrs. March. "Shall you take his paper?"

They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter, or by what an effort of the 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 temptation to retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was humbly 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

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 illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the town, and making unobtrusive

The day was important as the last of March's 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

"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 wanted me to. I said I couldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I

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, with one thing or another, and here in the spring we lost our

last daughter. Seemed perfectly well, and all at once she died; heartfailure, 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 softened; then they

flashed up, and March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked round 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 readingroom, to go

"No, thank you," said the general, as if it were much finer not; "I shall breakfast at our pension." He strolled

"I don't suppose I ought to feel that way," said Eltwin, with a remorse which March suspected a reproachful

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 he

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!" and laughed inattentively; when he went on to philosophize the

commonness of the sparse company always observable at the SansSouci as a just effect of its Laodicean

situation between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife frowned at him.

The flowerwoman 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

fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley,

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 caressingly to

"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

She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, 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.

His wife caught it farther away. "No, I'm going 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 down her lap; then she handed 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 Indiarubber sandals, 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!" she entreated, and after a tender struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to

them, and went away wearing them through the heelbands 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 hillclimb with the promise to meet him in the

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited the girl's advice with a fondness

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

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been sitting, they seemed to be followed.

They looked round and saw no one more alarming than a very severelooking old gentleman, whose hat brim

in spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat brims are. He touched it, and saying

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their skirts to see if there was anything

amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's

"Oh, I put 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! Wasn't it absurd?"

"It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards, "that they can always laugh over

"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 tomorrow,

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

conceived of him as a brother artist. This led to much bowing and smiling from the manager when the

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.

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 evergreens

stood a highpedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with whose sidewhiskers a laurel crown comported

itself as well as it could. At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood in evening

dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations 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 fellowartist to do him the pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of

the opera; he bowed a heartfelt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the invitation include her, and

She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone, and then he entreated March to 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 situation. Do you think we have made a mistake in having the

"We!" be retorted. "Oh, that's good! I'm going to shirk him, when it comes to going behind the scenes."

"No, no, dearest," she entreated. "Snubbing 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 curtain 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 readings of international romance

had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted full. Fat highhotes 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 slowly turned it from side to side, after she

removed the airy scarf which had covered it. Her father, in evening 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 Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave

scope to the actress who, 'als Gast' from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it. She merited the

distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.

"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 licks of sausage, those boundless fields of cabbage. But it's rather pathetic."

"It's disgusting," said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had been watching the actress through his

"Well, I don't know. It's amusing. Do you suppose we shall see her when we go behind, March?"

He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain 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 dancinggirls, who had come out for a breath of air, and

who pressed themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders. With their rouged faces, and the

stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues,

"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 accost 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 ineffective German, with every effect of improbability, that they were there by

The gendarme would not or could not make anything 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

dancinggirls 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 the head of the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over

the hubbub. As soon as the situation clarified itself 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 armchairs

with a rapidity of reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance

of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying 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

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been sitting with the ladies during

the absence of the gentlemen. He had knocked 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 inspired, 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 ParisNew York

Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took in. He was pale, and so discomposed

that the heart of justice was softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left him to the talk that

sprang up, 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 analysis

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 different 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 momently becoming less agitated; the young people were beginning to laugh at

the notion of Mr. March and General Triscoe going behind the scenes. Burnamy 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 extremely 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 laughed nervously, and said, "No, thank you!" and shut

"We must tell them," said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she was glad that the girl answered with a

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 lighted the casements and portals of the shops. High above all,

against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its skeleton had been growing for days, glittered

the colossal effigy of the doubleheaded 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

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 appeals

of "Bitte schon! Bitte schon!" He laughed to think of a New York cop saying "Please prettily! Please

prettily!" to a New York crowd which he wished to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame

to think how far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and hearts might be, when he heard

It was Stoller, 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

"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 human stream, had plunged in and rescued her. Before March could formulate 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 standing tiptoe in a

doorway and craning their necks upward 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 be was aware of

She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to forbear at once all question of her and all

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 eddying about

in the crowd. The general was still, expressing 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 laughingly, 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 gallantly

promising that his daughter and he would see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way

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.

"Because I didn't think he was just in the humor for it." He began to laugh as he sketched their encounter with

the gendarme, but she did not seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again. "Besides, I was afraid

"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 her. You will have

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him. "All right! I should have had to stand it,

"Why," she said, after reflection, "I don't see what either of us has done. We didn't get Burnamy to come

"Oh! Make Triscoe believe that! He knows you've 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, tonight. She

"Well, thank Heaven! we're off tomorrow morning, 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 aftercure."

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

redtablecloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by the pretty girl with the rosebud mouth

whom they had known only as Einund Zwanzig, and whose promise of "Komm' 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

tenderly pink. A young married couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat

"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 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 twospanner which they had ordered for the long drive to the station. The Swiss elevatorman

came to the door to offer them a fellowrepublican'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

"Well, I don't object," said March. "A man who can feed fourteen thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day,

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

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing. "I

was afraid I shouldn't get here in time," he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

"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 started, she fumbled for her handkerchief. "I suppose you call it

"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots 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 interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that it will

"Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding 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 interloping lover may come in and set our dearest interests on the

sidewalk. The disadvantage of living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people."

"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had died youngor younger," he

"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

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole occupancy of an unsmoking compartment,

while all the smoking compartments round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a

pleasing illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect 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 elderly

heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young. But it is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs.

March 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 aftercure. If he had found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat,

faintly nauseous water of the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twentyeight again till his second

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that they could form a lifelong friendship

for the old Englishspeaking 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 oatfields, where women were cutting the leisurely harvest with sickles, and where once

a great girl with swarthy bare arms unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and beauty, to

watch them go by. Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow oatfields, 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 closecropt pastures, herded by little girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as

cornflowers, followed the flying train. There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long barren acreages,

and growing up 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

"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 narrowness 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

"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 afterwards happened in Nuremberg,

though the old toycapital was trolley wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel

lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator which was so modern that it came

down with them as well as went up. All the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention 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 matteroffact and the

commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the gothic spirit which expresses itself in a

Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness, of endearing 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

tramcar at a venture. It was a sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside. of the

city gate to a trolleycar. The conductor with their fare demanded their destination; March frankly owned

that they did not know where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose; and the

conductor, 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

picturesqueness 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 appropriate the charm of the city.

The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevatorboy (flown with the insolent

recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the oneo'clock table

d'hote they took a noble twospanner 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 clinging to its crevices, or broad meshes of the shining foliage

mantling its blackened masonry. A tileroofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries 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 leaguer hosts had dashed themselves

in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would have flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers

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 incredible 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 anywhere else one may

feast it. The prospect of tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an abounding

fulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous roofs of redbrown 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 pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to gather in sufficient number, and then led

them through the terrible museum, discanting 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

"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

sightseers over to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of the Burg. These

were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the past are perpetually suffering in the present, and

there was some special painting and varnishing 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

comfort 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 sat together on the threshold of the gloomy tower, he most 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 mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his pedestal in the marketplace and contributed

from the bill of the goose under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of the wet

marketwomen round 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 barn, 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 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 German

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 because 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 Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrow

streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotel lay. How pretty, they said, to call

that charming port the Ladies' Gate! They promised each other 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

Nuremberg patriciate, whom they imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the city which it builded so strenuously 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 intention it seemed to March poor and coarse, as in the bronze fountain

beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in

streams that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base of the church there is a

timeworn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in its simplehearted 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 sculpture,

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 Nuremberg sculptor doing great things today, his work would be of

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 pewtops. The vergeress who showed the Marches

through the church was devout in the praise of these aristocratic fellowcitizens of hers. "So simple, and yet

so noble!" she said. She was a very romantic 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

masterwork with the lilylike droop at top, which gained him her hand. They did not realize 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

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 Albert Durer and Hans Sachs and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to the fascination of the bronze

skull on the tomb of a fourteenthcentury patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw

hinged to the upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless

smile, to let them discover the bead 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

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 escutcheons 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 reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in sculpture

at one corner 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 penitence 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 another, 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.

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 Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of

Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna'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

workpeople furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the custodian who had it in charge

to show it properly to strangers. She was of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence

and the guardian 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 galalife of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself

after enjoying it for having felt in it that toyfigure quality which seems the final effect of the German

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal of the day by ceasing from

sightseeing. She could not have understood the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the

lingering conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then she found nothing of the

gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic lands. The people were resting from their weekday

labors, but they were not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses, were locked

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this ancient city, where the past was so much

alive in the perpetual picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were fain to escape from

the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily

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 discovered that they were all Americans. The stranger proved to

be an American of the sort commonest in 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 stepbrothers, and joined them is a common interest. The GermanAmerican said he was

bookkeeper in some glassworks which had been closed by our tariff, and he confessed that he did not mean

to return to us, though he spoke of German 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

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for goodby; and as he walked down the aisle of trees

in which they had been fitting together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such Americanism

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 the 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

"Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose," he added, dreamily, "that what we used to like in Italy

was the absence of all the modern 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

"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 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 themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of

tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the suckingpigs jolted over the pavements in handcarts; a

certain majesty from the long procession of yellow mailwagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian blue,

trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their glazed hatbrims 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 photographs of the

architecture than he wanted, and more local histories than be should ever read. He made a last effort for the

contemporaneous life by asking the Englishspeaking clerk if there were any literary men of distinction

He went home to breakfast wondering if be should be able to make his meagre facts serve with his wife; but

he found 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 otherwise

have pierced them through. The bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian

lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as little, but delicately blond. Nature 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 impartially who they

were, where they met, and how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his

personal immunity 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 gloating 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 tiresome as most other marriages,

and yet she was abandoning herself with those ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and

"Yes, that's the worst of it. It shows how povertystricken 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

"You're always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will be personal, I'll say that you've been as

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too, like

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

"It is, rather," he confessed. "It makes me feel as if I must go to see the house of Durer, after all."

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 Durer'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 Durer's time. His dwelling, in no way

impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow sidehill street that

sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life belowstairs, and above was none

the cozier for the stiff appointment of a showhouse. It was cavernous and cold; but if there had been a fire in

the kitchen, and a table laid in the diningroom, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German fashion,

in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there. It in no wise

suggested the calling of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer'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 Durer'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 expected 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."

"A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was a God fearing woman, and had a New

"Yes; but I don't like her laying her plans to survive 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 goodhumor

with themselves that they were willing to include 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

The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been 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 England 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 already 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 always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her merit in

this devotion with an artless 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 promise 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 providential, 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

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, 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. There 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 practicalminded

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 Nuremberg; 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." Her

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

pileup of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with

trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those

overhanging houses; and the marketplace, and the squares before the churches, with their queer shops in the

"I see what you mean. But do you think it's as sacred to us as it would have been twentyfive years ago? I

"Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had not been so good. We might have

"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

"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

"Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her." March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone, and after a

while 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 young. We're either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're

ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world. The worst of it is, we

elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at the bottom of our 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.

"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in that way. I know she is dead in love

"Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity. If she accepted 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 begun by confessing

that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad. Poor old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could

"Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find him in Ansbach. I'm sure I don't know where he is."

"Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her. I've asked the banker in Nuremberg

to forward our letters to the poste restante in Ansbach. Isn't it good to see the crows again, after those ravens

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 conscience, whatever happens," she added in dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.

"I'm thankful too, my dear. I'd much rather have things on my own. I'm more used to that, and I believe I feel

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 Burnamy's furtive reappearance

in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it, and she had at that moment a longing for support

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 yon. It is something that you

She hesitated for the reason, and "Well!" said her father, looking up at her from his second cup of coffee.

"The night of the Emperor's birthday. He came into the box when you were behind the scenes with Mr.

"Did she say you ought to wait a week?" He gave way to an irascibility which he tried to check, and to ask

"He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris." The girl had the effect of gathering her courage up for

a bold plunge. She looked steadily at her father, and added: "He said he came back because he couldn't help

it. Hewished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no right to suppose I cared anything about what

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave the word to him, now. He hesitated

to take it, but he asked at last with a mildness that seemed to surprise her, "Have you heard anything from

"I don't know. I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must tell you about it."

The case was less simple than it would once have been for General Triscoe. There was still his affection for

his daughter, his wish for her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his 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 have kept his daughter to himself if she could

not have been very prosperously married. On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom she now hardly

"He was very anxious," she went on, "that you should know just how it was. He thinks everything of your

judgment andandopinion." The general made a 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 himself, or ask you to

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, "How do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?"

"She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr. Stoller 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 remorse for

"There's something in that," the general admitted, with a candor that he made the most of both to himself and

to her. "But I should like to know what Stoller had to say of it all. Is there anything," he inquired, "any reason

"Oh, he can very well afford to wait. If he values my opinion so highly he can give me time to make up my

"And I'm not responsible," the general continued, significantly, "for the delay altogether. If you had told me

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 Burnamy had done to

Stoller rather than of what Burnamy 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 accepted 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 convictions 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

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would step round to Pupp's and see if

Stoller were still there. But on the 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 aftercure. 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

"No. I understand," he intimated, "that there is nothing at all in the nature of aaan understanding, then,

"Hm!" The general waited a moment. Then he ventured, "Do you care to saydo you wish me to

The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she governed herself to say, "Hehe was disappointed."

It was a question, and she answered: "He thought he had. He saidthat he wouldn'ttrouble me any more."

The general did not ask at once, "And you don't know where he is nowyou haven't heard anything from