THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY. 

By William Dean Howells

Part I. 

[NOTE: Several chapter heading numerals are out of order or missing inthis 1899 edition, however the text is all present in the three volumes. D. W. ]

I. 

"You need the rest, " said the Business End; "and your wife wants you togo, as well as your doctor. Besides, it's your Sabbatical year, and you, could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine. "

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course not, " said Fulkerson. "If you won't take a year, take threemonths, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway. You can make uphalf a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well thatyou needn't think about 'Every Other Week' from the time you start tillthe time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back. I cantake a hack at the editing myself, if Tom's inspiration gives out, andput a little of my advertising fire into the thing. " He laid his hand onthe shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed andshook him in the liking there was between them. "Now you go, March! Mrs. Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year, andwe want Mrs. March and you to have yours. You let me go down and engageyour passage, and--"

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

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, itwas a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if theflowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had beengoing so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among thebutterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion, himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked thenotion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever tofind it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when theywere young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going backthere, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the time when theycould do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreamingis not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to workpretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced to forego thedistinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because hehad their common living to make, and he could not make it by writinggraceful verse, or even graceful prose. He had been many years in asufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of leavingit when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always beenrather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it. Atany rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by asubordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered aplace of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able todecline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial workwith the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting forwork he hated. It was an incredible chance, but it was renderedappreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leaveBoston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March aswell as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiarties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise whichformed his chance was to be founded. 

It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner hadimagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicateafforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit. Themagazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on moreor less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and 'Every OtherWeek' was apparently--the only periodical of the kind conditioned forsurvival. It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and it had theinstant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed, but which didnot change so soon that the magazine had not time to establish itself ina wide acceptance. It was now no longer a novelty, it was no longer inthe maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered upon its secondyouth with the reasonable hope of many years of prosperity before it. Infact it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and the Marcheshad the conditions, almost dismayingly perfect, in which they had oftenpromised themselves to go and be young again in Europe, when theyrebelled at finding themselves elderly in America. Their daughter wasmarried, and so very much to her mother's mind that she did not worryabout her, even though she lived so far away as Chicago, still a wildfrontier town to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as heleft college, had taken hold on 'Every Other Week', under his father'sinstruction, with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson'spraise as a chip of the old block. These two liked each other, and workedinto each other's hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March hadever done. It amused the father to see his son offering Fulkerson thesame deference which the Business End paid to seniority in March himself;but in fact, Fulkerson's forehead was getting, as he said, moreintellectual every day; and the years were pushing them all alongtogether. 

Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day he fell down in it. He had a long sickness, and when he was well of it, he was so slow ingetting his grip of work again that he was sometimes deeply discouraged. His wife shared his depression, whether he showed or whether he hid it, and when the doctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctor withall the strength of a woman's hygienic intuitions. March himselfwillingly consented, at first; but as soon as he got strength for hiswork, he began to temporize and to demur. He said that he believed itwould do him just as much good to go to Saratoga, where they always hadsuch a good time, as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obligedseveral times to leave him to his own undoing; she always took him morevigorously in hand afterwards. 

II. 

When he got home from the 'Every Other Week' office, the afternoon ofthat talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife atFulkerson's notion of a Sabbatical year. She did not think it was so verydroll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now theauthority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish ofabsurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which hadbeen his right before. 

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

"Oh, we could!" she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicateresponsibility of persuading her that he was joking. 

He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson's absurdity. "It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbaticalyear--a good deal after date. But I suppose that would make it all themore silvery. "

She faltered in her elation. "Didn't you say a Sabbatical year yourself?"she demanded. 

"Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression. "

"And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expressiontoo!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on. " She wassilent, and he yielded to another fancy. "We might imagine coming uponour former selves over there, and travelling round with them--a weddingjourney 'en partie carree'. "

"Something like that. I call it a very poetical idea, " she said with asort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush. 

"It isn't so bad, " he admitted. "How young we were, in those days!"

"Too young to know what a good time we were having, " she said, relaxingher doubt for the retrospect. "I don't feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple. I would like togo, just to make sure that I had been. " He was smiling again in the wayhe had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, "What is it?"

"Nothing. I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people whoactually hadn't been before--carry them all through Europe, and let themsee it in the old, simple-hearted American way. "

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

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

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

"I'm not so sure of that. "

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

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

"Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it. "

"It might be a good thing, " he mused, "to take a couple who had passedtheir whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; andhad a perfect famine for Europe all the time. I could have them spendtheir Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking uptheir accommodations. I could have them sail, in imagination, anddiscover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions ofit from travels and novels against a background of purely Americanexperience. We needn't go abroad to manage that. I think it would berather nice. "

"I don't think it would be nice in the least, " said Mrs. March, "and ifyou don't want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all. "

"Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey. "

"I see. You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it. "

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was reallysilent. He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back togood-humor. He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken andlook at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused. When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consentedto go. 

III. 

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took ahint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fanciedsome people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the nextSunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken. To besure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoonof any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisiblethread of association which drew him. 

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for theoutward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged withshining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-paintedas only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed steward ran before thevisitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typicalstate-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their firstimpression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of theladies' parlor and music-room. March made his wife observe that thetables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scatteredabout, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against roughweather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greensand coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied incolor from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those largemarch-panes in the roof. She laughed with him at the tastelessness of therace which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she madehim own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly likeserving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter'; when they went ashore shechallenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that theColmannia was perfect. 

"She has only one fault, " he assented. "She's a ship. "

"Yes, " said his wife, "and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before Idecide. "

Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take, and not whether they should take any. He explained, at first gently andafterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enoughfor him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing tocross the Atlantic in. 

When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to theopposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprisednor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home, offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe. She answeredto all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much that she wasglad to give it up. She gave it up, with the best feeling; all that shewould ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to her again. She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship as theColmannia did not make him want to go. 

At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well. Hehad kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and aSilver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he hadpersisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards thathe would not go abroad on any account. It was by a psychological jugglewhich some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day toget the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got aplan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that theymight be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts. 

IV. 

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

They began to amass maps and guides. She got a Baedeker for Austria andhe got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least usethere, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information. He gota phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German. He used to readGerman, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romanticpoetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he heldimaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, andtried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of thosepoets for a whole generation. He perceived, of course, that unless thebarber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which theauthor of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on withthem beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil hispleasure in it. In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realizedhow little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly, had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book. 

Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place forit; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining therespective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia. She carried on herresearches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences werealone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she valuedthem equally at first or second hand. She heard of ladies who would notcross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for months to get aroom on her; she talked with ladies who said that nothing would inducethem to cross in her. There were ladies who said she had twice the motionthat the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her twin screws wasfrightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats, and it did notaffect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screwboat too. It was repeated to her in the third or fourth degree ofhear-say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as that onthe Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line assured her thatthe table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the Frenchboats. To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still living who hadfriends on board, the Colmannia had once got aground, and the Norumbiahad once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it might be theColmannia; they promised to ask and let her know. Their lightest wordavailed with her against the most solemn assurances of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but innavigation were not to be trusted; they would say anything from areckless and culpable optimism. She obliged March all the same to askamong them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came homesaying that one man had told him you could have played croquet on thedeck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed, and anotherthat he never saw the racks on in three passages he had made in theNorumbia. 

The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, butwhen they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. Marchliked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly wait forMonday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the Colmannia wouldbe gone before they could engage one. 

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

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

He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady camewith her husband for an evening call, before going into the country. Atsight of the plans of steamers on the Marches' table, she expressed thegreatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe. They hadsupposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not hearda word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March foundrather unduly filial. In getting a little past the prime of life he didnot like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he didnot think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated asif they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sortsof impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so muchthe better for the little outing! Under his breath, he confounded thislady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice attheir going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always socareful of you. She made her husband agree with her, and it came out thathe had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia. Hevolunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she didnot have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; andthe captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people didcall her unlucky. 

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

"Oh, I don't know. People will say anything about any boat. You know shebroke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice. "

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and sheparted gayly with this over-good young couple. As soon as they were gone, March knew that she would say: "You must change that ticket, my dear. Wewill go in the Norumbia. "

"Suppose I can't get as good a room on the Norumbia?"

"Then we must stay. "

In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night atall, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and questionthem up about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard she wascalled an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history. They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient ofMrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction oftheir insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms were left onthe Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through hispassenger list with a shaking head. He was afraid there was nothing theywould like. 

"But we would take anything, " she entreated, and March smiled to think ofhis innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of notgoing. 

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

They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do notunderstand, in the foreign steamship offices. The clerk turnedunsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in Germanwhich March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of aconversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker. A brief dramafollowed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of theNorumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it ifthey decided to take it at once. 

They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia;it was within one of being the same number. It was so providential, if itwas providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; evenMrs. March was silent. In this supreme moment she would not prompt herhusband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that hesaid, "We will take it. "

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free;and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all theevents before it. No event that followed affected it, though the dayafter they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she hadonce been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He feltobliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it provednothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reasonthan by all her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never preparedfor in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men. 

V. 

During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailingit seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never beenso interesting. He had not easily reconciled himself to the place afterhis many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, tothe noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the carelessgood-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainlymetropolis. There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentionaland unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorablefor the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat. Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to thetruncated towers of St. George's, and to the plain red-brick, white-trimmed front of the Friends' Meeting House; he came and wentbetween his dwelling and his office through the two places that form thesquare, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats byone of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothersof the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play. The elders readtheir English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, ormerely sat still and stared away the day's fatigue; while the little onesraced in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling andkissing. Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from thebrink of the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly upbehind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep. 

While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, theMarches often said how European all this was; if these women had broughttheir knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soonas they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American. Inlike manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they stillpined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of itby dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; butlater when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had notyet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New Yorksunset they were bowed out into. 

The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square. Theywere the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when theywere seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side, ordown the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trainssilhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling ofpervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors andcivilities was lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burnedfor hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagrationas memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset. 

The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough inour early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreouspink. A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in thelong respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels. But atlast a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before theNorumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights, which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and madethe exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for eithershore. 

VI. 

Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they hadscarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breathof its morning air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone; he hadbroken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out ofsight. But this was curiously like all other early mornings in hisconsciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wontedenvironment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation withthe familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of thetrees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung. Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of reading thereporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he should not see. 

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast, which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving insummer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June. Theillusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in theapartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual. Theheavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before, and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport toHoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboringlivery-stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew byname. 

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York thatyou could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you werestarting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, butsomehow it was not the consolation he had expected. He knew, of course, that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in theNorumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, andsweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of thedock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothlybowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot ofthe gangway at the ship's side, all in the cool of the early morning. Butthough he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions, there was by no means enough of it. 

The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat ofanother day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; andthat last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively, in a fashion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son that shedid not want him to come and see them off. Of, her daughter's coming allthe way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if hedid not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they werenot going. 

"Don't you want to go?" March asked with an obscure resentment. 

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

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

She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell withfriends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in suchrefuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushedand twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way. Shepitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could notlighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, whobroke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain youngmen, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men seethem; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming andshouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some girls, of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry, orat least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at thecards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one hadsent them flowers. Others whom young men had brought bunches of violetshid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs andcard-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up. Others, hadgot places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes oflong-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of themen, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins. In the midstof the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and knees, andbewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered them withquestions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifledabout in their thick uniforms. 

Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidlysmearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly setwith the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends onshore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noisesmidway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probablynot going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or evenfor their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girltwisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it. He turned fromit, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was laughing at hisshoulder. He said that he had to come down with a good-by letter from hissister, which he made an excuse for following them; but he had alwaysmeant to see them off, he owned. The letter had just come with a specialdelivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent another good-byletter with some flowers on board. Mrs. March scolded at them both, butwith tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting which hethought he had put from him, March went on taking note, as with aliensenses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on together, andrepeated the nothings they had said already. 

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds wheresome freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemicallywith the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia. Themass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs, and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, anddischarged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost inthe crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged andarrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again. 

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleriesleading, fore and aft, into the ship. Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them withtheir hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ranbefore them into the different depths and heights where they hid theseburdens, and then ran back for more. Some of the passengers followed themand made sure that their things were put in the right places; most ofthem remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in andout of the doors of the promenades. 

The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf, with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of theship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harshhissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent reason why itshould all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began tobe warnings that were almost threats of the end. The ship's whistlesounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humblyentreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried toEurope. They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she wassure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason. He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last chargesabout 'Every Other Week'. 

Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arrivingpassengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks ofbaggage swung more swiftly into the air. A bell rang, and there rosewomen's cries, "Oh, that is the shore-bell!" and men's protests, "It isonly the first bell!" More and more began to descend the gangways, foreand aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard. 

March tried not to be nervous about his son's lingering; he was ashamedof his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, "Better be off, Tom. "

His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried toEurope; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as ifthere had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him andwould not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last bypushing him into the gangway with her own hands: he nodded and waved hishat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd. 

Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors beganto undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship's side; files of menon the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding theirapproach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomimeforbade some belated leavetakers to ascend. These stood aside, exchangingbows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach; they all triedto make one another hear some last words. The moment came when the saloongangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the section of thebulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on this side of theworld. An indefinable impulse communicated itself to the steamer: whileit still seemed motionless it moved. The thick spread of faces on thewharf, which had looked at times like some sort of strange flowers in alevel field, broke into a universal tremor, and the air above them wasfilled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds risingfrom the field. 

The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that theydid; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother saidthat she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though shewas glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural thathe should not, when everybody else was saying good-by. 

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased tohave the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like animpressionistic study. As the ship swung free of the shed and got intothe stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain moment, all was stillNew York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and monstrousshows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at sea andon the way to Europe. 

The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with thedeck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in thebest places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarilyverifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores, while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, andas it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless. A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flyingdown the promenade from the steerage. "Capitan! Capitan! There is awoman!" he shouted in nondescript English. "She must go hout! She must gohout!" Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command and seemedto penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with a sort ofmajestic relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it;the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawledsafely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer movedseaward again. 

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

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" evenbefore she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwroughtsympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who haveescaped danger. She would not hear any excuse for her. "Her childrenoughtn't to have been out of her mind for an instant. "

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

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

In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot's lettersshe made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which oncemore left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many timesreiterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would notstick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not tobe a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of themail decided. 

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

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

He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiarthings when he came with their daughter's steamer letter and the flowersand fruit she had sent. She said, Very well, they would all keep, andwent on with her unpacking. He asked her if she did not think these homethings made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way sheshould certainly go back on the pilot-boat. He perceived that her nerveswere spent. He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about thelife-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn, wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer downtheir corridor. 

VII. 

In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife'sanxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seatsin the dining-saloon. At first he had his ambition for the captain'stable, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convincedMrs. March that the captain's table had become a superstition of thepast, and conferred no special honor. It proved in the event that thecaptain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloonamong the passengers who paid least for their rooms. But while theMarches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get whatadventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where heliked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to seewhat he had done for them. 

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the ovalopenings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up intothe music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters. The tables werebrightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marchesthought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to thelast detail in blue and white violets. The ports of the saloon were open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the tremorfrom her screws. The sound of talking and laughing rose with the clatterof knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell of thecoffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses andcarnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joyof travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair. When the headsteward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they bothmade an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had beena company at some far-forgotten table d'hote in the later sixties. Thehead steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but thetable-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with"Bleace!" for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as theequivalent of their native "Bitte!" Otherwise there was no reason tosuppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a goodhalf of the passengers. The stewards looked English, however, inconformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaringpeople, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible. 

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentativethat if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothingmore than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down. He neednot really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more orless nodded in return. 

A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the leftof the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almostmagisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she werehis mother and understood him. March decided that she had been some timea widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right hadbeen so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have itknown. Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think sogood-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a prettynose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallenlashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps theexigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm. She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black, roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion notparticularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so wellas she might if she had chosen. The elderly man on her right, it was easyto see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair hair, now ashen with age, was so different from hers. He wore his beard cut inthe fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic mustache, imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and there wassomething Gallic in its effect and something remotely military: he hadblue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though be frowned a gooddeal, and managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as ifchallenging a potential disagreement with his opinions. 

The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of thehumorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner ofhis kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at oncequestioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them. Heresponded to March's bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whosemother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comelybulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness. She wasbrilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched onher pretty nose. 

If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at oncerenew itself in that form. Nothing was said while they were having theirfirst struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if toshow how fully they had misunderstood it. The gentleman at the head ofthe table intervened at last, and then, "I'm obliged to you, " March said, for your German. I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket. "

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

The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposespeople to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries madeevery one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effectof being tacitly amused. 

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

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

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

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

The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this, and said he didnot see why they should not make it a pleasure-trip, too. They putthemselves in a position to be patronized by their deference, and in thepauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of the table, Marchheard his wife abusing their inexperience to be unsparingly instructiveabout European travel. He wondered whether she would be afraid to ownthat it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed the ocean; thoughthat might seem recent to people who had never crossed at all. 

They listened with respect as she boasted in what an anguish of wisdomshe had decided between the Colmannia and the Norumbia. The wife said shedid not know there was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs. Marchperfervidly assured her that there was all the difference in the world, she submitted and said she supposed she ought to be thankful that they, had hit upon the right one. They had telegraphed for berths and takenwhat was given them; their room seemed to be very nice. 

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

"I'm not sure which is the south side, " said the bride. "We seem to havebeen going west ever since we started, and I feel as if we should reachhome in the morning if we had a good night. Is the ocean always so smoothas this?"

"Oh, dear, no!" said Mrs. March. "It's never so smooth as this, " and shebegan to be outrageously authoritative about the ocean weather. She endedby declaring that the June passages were always good, and that if theship kept a southerly course they would have no fogs and no icebergs. Shelooked round, and caught her husband's eye. "What is it? Have I beenbragging? Well, you understand, " she added to the bride, "I've only beenover once, a great while ago, and I don't really know anything about it, "and they laughed together. "But I talked so much with people after wedecided to go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times. "

"I know, " said the other lady, with caressing intelligence. "That is justthe way with--" She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the headsteward was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March. He cameforward, stuffing his cap into the pocket of his blue serge sack, andsmiled down on the company with such happiness in his gay eyes that Marchwondered what chance at this late day could have given any human creaturehis content so absolute, and what calamity could be lurking round thecorner to take it out of him. The new-comer looked at March as if he knewhim, and March saw at a second glance that he was the young fellow whohad told him about the mother put off after the start. He asked himwhether there was any change in the weather yet outside, and he answeredeagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the mere sound ofwords were a favor done him, that their ship had just spoken one of thebig Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalled back that she had met ice;so that they would probably keep a southerly course, and not have itcooler till they were off the Banks. 

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

"That was what I thought, " said Mrs. March. "I almost sent my husbandback for my shawl!" Both the ladies laughed and liked each other fortheir common experience. 

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

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

"Why, do you think it's uncomfortably warm?" he asked, from what Marchperceived to be a meteorology of his own. He laughed and added, "It ispretty summerlike, " as if he had not thought of it before. He talked ofthe big mail-boat, and said he would like to cross on such a boat asthat, and then he glanced at the possible advantage of having your ownsteam-yacht like the one which he said they had just passed, so near thatyou could see what a good time the people were having on board. He beganto speak to the Marches; his talk spread to the young couple across thetable; it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she mightignore without apparent rejection, and without really avoiding the boy, it glanced off toward the father and daughter, from whom it fell, to restwith the gentleman at the head of the table. 

It was not that the father and daughter had slighted his overture, if itwas so much as that, but that they were tacitly preoccupied, or were ofsome philosophy concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not sufferthem, for the present, at least, to share in the common friendliness. This is an attitude sometimes produced in people by a sense of just, oreven unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes bytransient annoyance. The cause was not so deep-seated but Mrs. March, before she rose from her place, believed that she had detected a slant ofthe young lady's eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man; andshe leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a matter where all logicalsteps are impertinent. She did not announce her arrival at this pointtill the young man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon, and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under the table. 

He went away with her thanks, and then she said to her husband, "Well, he's perfectly charming, and I don't wonder she's taken with him; thatkind of cold girl would be, though I'm not sure that she is cold. She'sinteresting, and you could see that he thought so, the more he looked ather; I could see him looking at her from the very first instant; hecouldn't keep his eyes off her; she piqued his curiosity, and made himwonder about her. "

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. 

The list did not say of itself, but with the help of the head steward'sdiagram it said that the gentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R. M. Kenby; the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and MissTriscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. And Mrs. Leffers; the mother and herson were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came inlast was Mr. L. J. Burnamy. March carried the list, with these namescarefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his wifein her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and thecharacter of the people from it. In this sort of conjecture longexperience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down andlooked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply. 

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left. Some fishing-boatsflickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; butalready, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacioussolitude of the ocean was beginning. There was no swell; the sea layquite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sunflamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud. With the light fair wind, there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from thesmoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil. 

The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk ofFourteenth Street on a summer's day, and showed much the social averageof a New York shopping thoroughfare. Distinction is something that doesnot always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is stillmore retrusive. A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the mostnotable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures. Hiscriticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appealas he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw acrosstheir barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and hecould wonder if they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he had seencertain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had noweither retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to theprevailing type. It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but hewished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it. 

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did. Itmight be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that hisglasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies thatforbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that thetrouble was with his glasses. He made what he could of a pretty girl whohad the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and wasluring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat. She had alreadyattached one of them; and she was hooking out for more. She kept movingherself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing nowthis side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she hadsecured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned. 

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonalpleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already adisembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and hejoined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation ofseeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilotleaving the ship. He was climbing down the ladder which hung over theboat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her heldher from the ship's side with their oars; in the offing lay the whitesteam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of othertimes. The Norumbia's screws turned again under half a head of steam; thepilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and caughtthe bundle of letters tossed after him. Then his men let go the line thatwas towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer's departure wasfinally closed. It had been dramatically heightened perhaps by her finalimpatience to be off at some added risks to the pilot and his men, butnot painfully so, and March smiled to think how men whose lives are allof dangerous chances seem always to take as many of them as they can. 

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

"I'm glad we're not taking the pilot on, at least, " answered the elderlyman whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father anddaughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him. Hewondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating the beautyof the ship's passengers: he saw now that she was not only extremelypretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even haddistinction. He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same time ofreproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance and notvery successful denial in her father's; and he went back with theseimpressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the shiphad stopped. 

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

"Of course I don't want you to eavesdrop, but I do want you to find outabout them. And about Mr. Burnamy, too. I can wait, about the others, ormanage for myself, but these are driving me to distraction. Now, willyou?"

He said he would do anything he could with honor, and at one of theearliest turns he made on the other side of the ship he was smilinglyhalted by Mr. Burnamy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if he werenot Mr. March of 'Every Other Week'; he had seen the name on thepassenger list, and felt sure it must be the editor's. He seemed sotrustfully to expect March to remember his own name as that of a writerfrom whom he had accepted a short poem, yet unprinted, that the editorfeigned to do so until he really did dimly recall it. He even recalledthe short poem, and some civil words he said about it caused Burnamy tooverrun in confidences that at once touched and amused him. 

IX. 

Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found, when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boatout. His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office ofthe Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in bysufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been givenup, in one of the saloon-deck rooms. It was that or nothing; and he feltrich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled himto come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the differencebetween the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which hewould have taken if he had been allowed a choice. 

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

He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-Americanrestaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claretincluded. When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it wasstiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again inlack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze, which he made the most of by keeping his hat off. It did not reallymatter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weatherwhich had nothing to do with the temperature. Partly because he was bornto such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him, and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, hewas opulently content with the present moment. But he thought verytolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he hadalready made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America. New Yorkwas very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got afoothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, hebelieved, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurthim with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West. 

He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come homeso dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky. He fancied, for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not itsglare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as tosee it more and more objectively. It was his power of detachment fromthis that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charmas to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them togetherfor a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do withhis success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself. Perhapshe was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; hecould, detach himself from his art as well as his material. 

Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite ofthe susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work. Heknew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths ofunprofessional tenderness in his nature. He was good to his mother, andhe sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where hehad left her when he came to Chicago. After he got that invitation fromthe Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he hadnot felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should notknow it was he who had invented that nickname for him. He promptly avowedthis in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the Birdof Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away. He failed tomove their imagination when he brought up as a reason for softeningtoward him that he was from Burnamy's own part of Indiana, and was abenefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was graduated. But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad of hisgood luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as most peopleseem to get their luck. They liked him, and some of them liked him forhis clean young life as well as for his cleverness. His life was known tobe as clean as a girl's, and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes, though he had rather more chin than most girls. 

The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessedhe would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, ifthe conductor would put him off at the right place. It was nearly nineo'clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, wherehe had decided to pass the night. After he found her, and went on board, he was glad he had not gone sooner. A queasy odor of drainage stole upfrom the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness ofthe bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a comingand going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling ofchains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then suddensilences of trampling sea-boots. Burnamy looked into the dining-saloonand the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; thenhe went to his state-room. His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had notcome; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled intohis berth. 

He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receivingimpressions. He could not think of any one who had done the facts of theeve of sailing on an Atlantic liner. He thought he would use the materialfirst in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he foundhimself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to thechoice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of therestaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he hadbegun to dream, and that he must get up. He was just going to get up, when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the newday outside. He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six; heglanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night alonein it. Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth, andjumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no feature oremotion of the ship's departure. 

When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coathe had put on at the instigation of the early morning air. His room-matewas still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage, and Burnamy tried to infer him from it. He perceived a social quality inhis dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, andsole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his ownequipment. The things were not so new as his; they had an effect ofpolite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them hereand there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, andBurnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if ithad not been for the initials U. S. A. Which followed the name of E. B. Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot ofthe lower berth. 

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of thepassenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in thesteamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, andhe now imagined a trespass on his property. But he reassured himself by aglance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down thestream and through the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his roomagain, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look betterin the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course heprofessed a much more general purpose. He blamed himself for not havinggot at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of thepassengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which hethought might do. 

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had alreadymissed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into;and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered downthe narrow passage where he supposed it was. A lady was standing at anopen state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaningforward with her head within and talking to some one there. Before hecould draw back and try another corridor he heard her say: "Perhaps he'ssome young man, and wouldn't care. "

Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within. The ladyspoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, "No, I don't suppose youcould; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer. "

She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering amoment at the threshold. She looked round over her shoulder anddiscovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage. She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape;with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, shevanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stoodstaring into the doorway of his room. 

He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put onhis enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderlygentleman who had sat next her at breakfast. He begged his pardon, as heentered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him. "I'm afraid I leftmy things all over the place, when I got up this morning. "

The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from hishand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamyvow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all theway over. "You slept on board, then, " he suggested, arresting himselfwith a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certainpocket of his steamer bag. 

"Oh, yes, " Burnamy laughed, nervously: "I came near oversleeping, andgetting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself, and so--"

He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements ofMr. Triscoe with a wistful eye. He would have liked to offer his lowerberth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possessionof the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it. He noticed thatas the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather aweary easing of his person from one limb to the other. He stooped to pullhis trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him. 

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

"Why, yes, " the other assented. "You're very good, " and as he took outhis key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to theintimacies of the situation. "Have you arranged with the bath-stewardyet? It's such a full boat. "

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

"No; no. Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you. "

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

The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamyfancied suspicion and even resentment. But he said, after the moment ofreflection which he gave himself, "Why, thank you, if you don't mind, really. "

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

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

X. 

In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which hebelieved would take his listener's intelligent fancy, and he stopped solong before he had tired him that March said he would like to introducehim to his wife. He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his ownyouth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to theyoung fellow's advantage. But they were both from the middle West; intheir native accent and their local tradition they were the same; theywere the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in theirliterary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions. 

Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would bedelighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March saidshe was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and askedhim whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite. Without givinghim time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said thatshe had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father hadleft in charge of 'Every Other Week' for the few months they were to begone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago. She madehim sit down by her in March's chair, and before he left them March heardhim magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do somethingmore for the magazine soon. He sauntered away and did not know howquickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush whichbecame him in her eyes:

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

"Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy, " she began, but she saw that he did notwish her to continue. 

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

He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to herfather, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth. Hesaid he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraidthey might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it. 

"I see, " said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, "She looks likerather a proud girl. "

"Yes, " the young fellow sighed. 

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

"Well, " Burnamy owned, "that is certainly one of the complications, " andthey laughed together. 

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

"Well, " Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh ofembarrassment, "I've done it already. "

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

"No!"

"And how did he take it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh. "It seems to me thatthis Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he wasentitled to. Why shouldn't he have offered him the lower berth? And whyshouldn't the old gentleman have taken it just as he did? Did you wanthim to make a counteroffer of his daughter's hand? If he does, I hope Mr. Burnamy won't come for your advice till after he's accepted her. "

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

"For him, very likely. But I think you would call it sinuous in some oneyou hadn't taken a fancy to. "

"No, no. I wish to be just. I don't see how he could have come straightat it. And he did own up at last. " She asked him what Burnamy had donefor the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem, yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it hadtemperament. 

"He has temperament, too, " she commented, and she had made him tell hereverything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, beforeshe let the talk turn to other things. 

The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; thesteamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them withan effect of long habit. Those who would be walking up and down had beguntheir walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room; ladieswho were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the music-room. Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the rail, and thepromenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or work slowlyround them. Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss parties atanother were forming among the young people. It was as lively and it wasas dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea. It was not the leastcooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer. 

In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly. Thedeck-steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, andhe had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunchsounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summonsto meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funnypassengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him fromwinding it. His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity, and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off. 

XI. 

At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people atthe Marches' table did not renew the premature intimacy of theirbreakfast talk. Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, andMarch went on deck without her. He began to walk to and from the barrierbetween the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, andmusing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligentand as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniarybetters of the saloon. 

There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to beteachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for alittle further study to fit them more perfectly for their work. Theygazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and hefeigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that thestamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or ifnot just, then inevitable. He argued with them that the sort of barrierwhich here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, raninvisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before theirkind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse thefact he was defending. Was it any worse, he asked them, than their notbeing invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue? Hemade them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole secondcabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced. Butthey continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever hereturned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, andstrolled off toward the steerage. 

There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into alittle space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deckat the bow. They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made theirfortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the returnto their own. They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalidthan they were going away; but he thought their average less apatheticthan that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and lookeddown at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and thelumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as theywrithed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, withher bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughedand shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walkedabout the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of histoothache-swollen face. The owner of the battery carried it away, and agroup of little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in thespace he had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eatingsome plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table. Hebegan to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it. 

An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, "I shouldn'twant a child of mine down there. "

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

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

"Well, " answered March, "you have some opportunities to get used to it onthis side, if you happen to live in New York, " and he went on to speak ofthe raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where helived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food ormoney as this poverty of the steerage. 

The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed. "Idon't believe I should like to live in New York, much, " he said, andMarch fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live. It appearedthat he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, buthe said it suited him. He added that he had never expected to go toEurope, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thoughthe had better go out and try Carlsbad. 

March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly hisown case. The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if itdetracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of thedifficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home. His heartopened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and hiswife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up. When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him, but that his name was Eltwin. He betrayed a simple wish to have Marchrealize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hardto comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and heknew that he was in the presence of a veteran. 

He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he wentdown to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense ofaffliction. "There are too many elderly invalids on this ship. I knockagainst people of my own age everywhere. Why aren't your youthful loversmore in evidence, my dear? I don't believe they are lovers, and I beginto doubt if they're young even. "

"It wasn't very satisfactory at lunch, certainly, " she owned. "But I knowit will be different at dinner. " She was putting herself together after anap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before. "I want youto look very nice, dear. Shall you dress for dinner?" she asked herhusband's image in the state-room glass which she was preoccupying. 

"I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots, " it answered. 

"I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard andWhite Star boats, when it's good weather, " she went on, placidly. "Ishouldn't want those people to think you were not up in the convenances. "

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

She attacked him at another point. "What has annoyed you? What else haveyou been doing?"

"Nothing. I've been reading most of the afternoon. "

"The Maiden Knight?"

This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board. It wasjust out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidalwave. It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of mediaevallife, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for historicalromance, while it flattered woman's instinct of superiority by thecelebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous andwholly superfluous self-sacrifice. 

March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, "I suppose youdidn't waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of 'EveryOther Week'?"

"Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair--foradvertising purposes, probably. "

"Mr. Burnamy has another, " she said. "I saw it sticking out of his pocketthis morning. "

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

"Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the menare going to dress, and let him know. He would never think of ithimself. "

"Neither would I, " said her husband. 

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

She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all insacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husbandand Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong. Every one talked; even thefather and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. Marchcould not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when shespoke. She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father addressedto Burnamy, though it led to nothing. 

XII. 

The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; andit went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundanceand variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by theice-closet. Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness theywere aware of alien witnesses. They looked up as by a single impulse, andsaw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down upontheir luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with yethungrier eyes. A boy's nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the height ofthe man's elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm. 

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

The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell. "I'm glad itdidn't begin with the Little Neck clams!"

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

The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked upover her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down. The youngbride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband lookedsevere, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make ascene. The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the port, and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look atBurnamy. 

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

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

The faces at the port vanished. At other ports profiles passed andrepassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them, but they paused no more. 

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

"Oh, " he mocked, "they had probably had a good substantial meal of theirown, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, apurely aesthetic treat. But supposing it wasn't, we're doing somethinglike it every day and every moment of our lives. The Norumbia is a pieceof the whole world's civilization set afloat, and passing from shore toshore with unchanged classes, and conditions. A ship's merely a smallstage, where we're brought to close quarters with the daily drama ofhumanity. "

"Well, then, " she protested, "I don't like being brought to closequarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it. And I don'tbelieve that the large English ships are built so that the steeragepassengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; andI'm sorry we came on the Norumbia. "

"Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide anything, " he began, and he wasgoing to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how theyfed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it creptout on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposedin time. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill newenough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there. 

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

All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash ofthe ship's course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard. In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close thather lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets thatsoared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to theNorumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark. 

Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were muchfreer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to gobelow, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely withsome lady. She clutched her husband's arm and stayed him in richconjecture. 

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

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

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

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

"It was such an unimportant matter that I didn't think to mention it. Heoffered it, and I took it; that was all. What difference could it havemade to you?"

"None. But one doesn't like to do any one an injustice. "

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

"No, of course not. "

XIII. 

The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say theyhave never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days outneither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy whenthe ship would be in. There was only a day or two when it could really becalled rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemedwilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around thestairs-landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifyingthe monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed withoutnoticing them. 

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

The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as ificebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her. In the ranks ofsteamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in themusic-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines ofsteamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputedabout the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried invain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write lettersthere. 

By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who couldkeep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which theyfound beyond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the first daysout, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night onboard before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying tosleep. 

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretchedcanvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boardsacross the bow end to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and thesea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the leepromenade. 

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves intheir poor variety. Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sailsset, lifted them like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of theocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against thehorizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight. A few trampsteamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, wereovertaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that herrusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of thepeople on board. 

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her. One daya small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of thepromenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste;a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsilyfrom wave to wave. The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, theartificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid andcold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, andwhere the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescentunder the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the fallingspray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like paintedcanvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage. Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougherweather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges. 

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the cloudsbroke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dimevening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through theragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, andshook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through everychange, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with thepulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in acourse which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows fromher sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western vergeof the sea. 

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony, with certain events which were part of the monotony. In the morning thelittle steward's bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and halfan hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose hadbeen served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards. Then they went ondeck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down, or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard andring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over theircards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon orthe music-room. At eleven o'clock they spoiled their appetites for lunchwith tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; atone, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they gluttedthemselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in theirberths or chairs. They did the same things in the afternoon that they haddone in the forenoon; and at four o'clock the deck-stewards came roundwith their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again to themusic of the band. There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and afterdinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills andtoast. At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and thesmoking-rooms. 

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

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

There seemed to be very little of it. There were not many young people onboard of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls. The young men weremainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among thesteamer chairs. It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in thesteerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion. Thepassengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to itunabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along therail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures. 

With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day inhis berth with a book under the convenient electric light. He was safethere from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only tofall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganicparticles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship'srun. 

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces ofthe great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterwardvanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves. He did notmeet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine themserved in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now andthen rather obtruded upon the public. There were people whom heencountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom henever saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the darkwhom he never met by day. But none of these were people of the greatworld. Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers, whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedomof the saloon promenade. 

From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive froma closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had neverbeen to Europe. But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect ofwithholding him from March's advances. Young Mr. And Mrs. Leffers threwoff more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and becamefrankly bride and groom. They seldom talked with any one else, except attable; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces;they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered themboth, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other'shands under it. 

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband wasstraying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies musthave exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him justhow long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and whathad been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy, and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland, after the summer's travel, and settling down with him at school there. She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother calledhim, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of thefirst grade in his quality of editor of 'Every Other Week', but as a sageof wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counselupon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life. 

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged incontemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of thepoem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in 'Every OtherWeek', and of the book which he was going to have published; and he letthe boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to anyauthor but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamyconfessed to have had. They were so near in age, though they were tenyears apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of othersmuch more his seniors. He was often in the company of Kenby, whom hevalued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted Marchupon Kenby's practice of always taking up the language of the country hevisited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higheropinion of him from March's approval. 

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when hesupposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could gethim to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he pouredout-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he hadwritten and what he meant to write. When he passed them where they sattogether, March heard the young fellow's perpetually recurring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering underthe drip-drip of his innocent egotism. 

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotalgirl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to him, in which a less penetratingscrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal. It was only attable that she could see them together, or that she could note any breakin the reserve of the father and daughter. The signs of this were so finethat when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity. But atbreakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of peopleaccustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the Marches, andbegan to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March of 'EveryOther Week', which he seemed to know of in its relation to him; and theyoung girl addressed herself to Mrs. March's motherly sense not the lessacceptably because indirectly. She spoke of going out with her father foran indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish than hers, and she madesome inquiries about places in Germany; they had never been in Germany. They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of Dresden with its Americancolony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs. March know anything aboutWeimar?

Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace inGermany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was goingwith her husband. She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for thetiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl's style was of New York rather thanof Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place. Mrs. March beganto try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and toclass them. She had decided from the first that they were society people, but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells whom shehad met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of holdingthemselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a right todo that if they chose. 

When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on betweenthese and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs. March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior whichMarch knew he should not be able to postpone. 

He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not atonce accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of anadvance from them because of their neutral literary quality, throughwhich they were of no social world, but potentially common to any. Latershe admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what shewanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl's towardfinding out something about Burnamy. 

The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his roundwith his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboringcorner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to haveher advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her. The girl tookMarch's vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which shecontinued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip. Mrs. Marchdid the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doingit, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her ahundredth bow with a hundredth smile. He perceived that she wished to getrid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief. 

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

"You are very good. " she answered, and gave it. 

Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, "Do you know Mr. Burnamy, MissTriscoe?" The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try tomake talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March. Thepivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment ofisolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, andhurried off to join her. 

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

"Then you don't feel that it was a very distinct success?" her husbandasked on his return. 

"Not on the surface, " she said. 

"Better let ill enough alone, " he advised. 

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

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

"If she wants it to. "

XIV. 

At dinner that day the question of 'The Maiden Knight' was debated amongthe noises and silences of the band. Young Mrs. Leffers had brought thebook to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it downbefore the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading itto her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon. 

"Don't you think it's perfectly fascinating, " she asked Mrs. Adding, withher petted mouth. 

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

"Oh, I could just read it forever!" the bride exclaimed. 

"I like a book, " said her husband, "that takes me out of myself. I don'twant to think when I'm reading. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The discouraging part is, " Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to theMarches, "that it's never a question of real taste. The things that godown with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgarpalate--Now in France, for instance, " he suggested. 

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

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

Burnamy could not bear to let it. "I don't pretend to be very well up inFrench literature, " he began, "but I think such a book as 'The MaidenKnight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a prettywell-built story when they like it. Of course it's sentimental, and itbegs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic incharacter, and it makes the reader imagine it too. The man who wrote thatbook may be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half. By-and-by he'll do something--after he's come to see that his 'MaidenKnight' was a fool--that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book. "

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred toMarch in the end, he deferred with authority still. March liked him forcoming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learnedto like yet. "Yes, " he said, "if he has the power you say, and can keepit after he comes to his artistic consciousness!"

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; RoseAdding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his motherviewed his rapture with tender amusement. The steward was at Kenby'sshoulder with the salad and his entreating "Bleace!" and Triscoe seemedto be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy's generaldisagreement. He said at last: "I'm afraid we haven't the documents. Youdon't seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven't read 'TheMaiden Knight'. " He added to March: "But I don't defend absinthe. Ice-water is better. What I object to is our indiscriminate taste bothfor raw whiskey--and for milk-and-water. "

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next. "Thedoctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into PlymouthWednesday morning. I always like to get a professional opinion on theship's run. "

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio thejournal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to herchildren, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their tablein the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual. 

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

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

"It must be delightful, " said the girl. She added as if she ought toexcuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers ifshe had chosen, "I'm sorry one sees so little of the artistic andliterary set. But New York is such a big place. "

"New York people seem to be very fond of it, " said Mrs. March. "Those whohave always lived there. "

"We haven't always lived there, " said the girl. "But I think one has agood time there--the best time a girl can have. It's all very well comingover for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere. Are you goingout for a long time?"

"Only for the summer. First to Carlsbad. "

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

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

"I was born there, --if that means knowing it. I lived there--till I waseleven years old. We came home after my mother died. "

"Oh!" said Mrs. March. 

The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of thoseleaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrivedat asking, "Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?"

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

"Poem?"

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

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

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

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

"I'm sure he's been very glad, " Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy's behalf, but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences theyshould shrink and wither away. 

"I always tell papa that there's no country like America for realunselfishness; and if they're all like that, in Chicago!" The girlstopped, and added with a laugh, "But I'm always quarrelling with papaabout America. "

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

But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all shemeant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs. March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy. She gave another ofher leaps. "I don't see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe, at home. They say that there was a time when there were no chaperonsbefore hoops, you know. " She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, restingone slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, asif she were getting ready to rise at any moment. "When they used to siton their steps. "

"It was very pleasant before hoops--in every way, " said Mrs. March. "Iwas young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was alwayssimpler than in New York. I used to sit on our steps. It was delightfulfor girls--the freedom. "

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

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

"Like that young lady who twists and turns?" said Miss Triscoe, givingfirst one side of her face and then the other. "They have a good time. Isuppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another. If itcame in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come inchaperons. You'll think I'm a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimesI wish there was more America instead of less. I don't believe it's asbad as people say. Does Mr. March, " she asked, taking hold of the chairwith one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, whileshe gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, "does hethink that America is going--all wrong?"

"All wrong? How?"

"Oh, in politics, don't you know. And government, and all that. Andbribing. And the lower classes having everything their own way. And thehorrid newspapers. And everything getting so expensive; and no regard forfamily, or anything of that kind. "

Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered, still cautiously, "I don't believe he does always. Though there are timeswhen he is very much disgusted. Then he says that he is getting tooold--and we always quarrel about that--to see things as they really are. He says that if the world had been going the way that people over fiftyhave always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in the timeof the anthropoidal apes. "

"Oh, yes: Darwin, " said Miss Triscoe, vaguely. "Well, I'm glad he doesn'tgive it up. I didn't know but I was holding out just because I had arguedso much, and was doing it out of--opposition. Goodnight!" She called hersalutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched her glidingout of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of theship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and wondered ifBurnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were a young manshe should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe. 

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

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

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

He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down thepromenade. The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of themusic-room, as she had done the day before. At first she revolved thereas if she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner;then she moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviouslyalone. Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs. March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too. Shewaited for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe keptchatting on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away. Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him. Thenshe heard him saying, "Would you like a turn or two?" and Miss Triscoeanswering, "Why, yes, thank you, " and promptly getting out of her chairas if the pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were allnothing. 

She had the composure to say, "You can leave your shawl with me, MissTriscoe, " and to receive her fervent, "Oh, thank you, " before they sailedoff together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of themusic-room. Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from whichshe roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when hehappened along. 

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

"That depends upon what you think of Burnamy. "

"Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from herjust when she's made sure of him. How do you suppose she is feeling now?"

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

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said. "I've beenhaving a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room. "

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

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

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

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

"What?"

"That there's no chance for, Burnamy. He's taking his daughter out tomarry her to a crowned head. "

XV. 

It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade. Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was threeor four deep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats ofthe young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who werewheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps. The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, andwas prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to gowrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March'swing. 

Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing inthe dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remainedtalking and laughing till the music began again. 

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

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

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her armthrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not. 

"Perhaps it is rather obvious, " he said, and he made a long glide overthe deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young manwho was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment herhat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to eachother within the circle. 

"How well she dances!" said Miss Triscoe. 

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

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

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marinecharities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets ofpassengers on all steamers. There were recitations in English and German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever morepiano performance. Most of those who took part were of the race gifted inart and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its fatherscounted the gate-money during the last half of the programme, with anaudible clinking of the silver on the table before them. 

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperonedby Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment. Shehoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the eveningended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting thesaloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people whotake no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange someunimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night. 

The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in thepretty harbor of Plymouth. In the cool early light the town lay distinctalong the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately withcome public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seatof aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on anotherthe tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were linesof fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone wallsdividing the green fields. The very iron-clads in the harbor close athand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blueEnglish sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of thesunrise had not quite faded. The breath of the land came freshly out overthe water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls wheeledand darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices on thetender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the ship'sside. A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage theyformed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out for theshore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they leftclustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. And Mrs. Leffers badeMarch farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee withthem before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave. 

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptlyfilled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated;these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placedat others. The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohiofriend and his wife. He tried to engage them in the tally which began tobe general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly heldaloof. 

Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was theusual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, amongthose who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continentis apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some meagre New Yorkstock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine printannounced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded acoal-mining strike in Pennsylvania. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That isn't sufficient ground. The Chinese are men and brothers; so arethe South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're notimpatient for the latest news about them. It's civilization thatinterests civilization. "

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

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

"We have that superstition in Chicago, " said Burnamy. He added, stillsmiling, "About the New-Yorkers, I mean. "

"You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed. New York is ananarchy, tempered by vigilance committees. "

"Oh, I don't think you can say that, " Kenby cheerfully protested, "sincethe Reformers came in. Look at our streets!"

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

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

"I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one ofthe things that help to establish Tammanys with us. You will see ourTammany in power after the next election. " Kenby laughed in alarge-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other'sflame. "New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it'smorally a frontier mining-town. Socially it's--" He stopped as if hecould not say what. 

"I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa, " said hisdaughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything aboutit. 

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

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

"Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?" asked March in thepause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh. 

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

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

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

"Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous newspapersfor exercising a man's right to live where he chooses. And there is nocountry in Europe--except Turkey, or Spain--that isn't a better home foran honest man than the United States. "

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

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed ananswer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubtedits validity. 

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend aviolent impulse upon it. He said, coldly, "I was speaking from thatstand-point. "

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

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make atCherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be inCuxhaven. Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Linebefore, and asked several questions. Her father did not speak again, andafter a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the movefrom table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Eltwin rose atthe same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke anotherdefeat, in some way. 

Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, "Ithink I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon. "

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation asdistinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whosedaughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed asideto let the two men come together. 

"That is all right, Colonel--"

"Major, " Eltwin conscientiously interposed. 

"Major, " Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the handwhich had been tremulously rising toward him. "There can't be any doubtof what we did, no matter what we've got. "

"No, no!" said the other, eagerly. "That was what I meant, sir. I don'tthink as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the countryhas a right to think what he pleases about it. "

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

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wifeof the one and the daughter of the other. They saw the young girl makingsome graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went. 

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

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

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

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

XVI. 

That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of hisopinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldomable to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his beliefin our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he hadleft a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary ofa minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union. Some millions ofother men had gone into the war from the varied motives which impelledmen at that time; but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man ofproperty and a man of family, in doing so. His family had improved astime passed, and it was now so old that back of his grandfather it waslost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired from the sea and become amerchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his son establishedhimself as a physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-traderwhose social position was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked tomention his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to realizejust how anomalous his part in a war against slavery was; it heightenedthe effect of his pose. 

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevettedBrigadier-General at the close. With this honor, and with the wound whichcaused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of arich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which wasnot long in going to pieces in his hands. Then the young couple went tolive in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother diedwhen the child was ten years old. A little later his father-in-law died, and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which hisdaughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had aright to expect. 

The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go backto Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under theRepublic as they had been under the Second Empire. He was still willingto do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to beused on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his provision-man wassent to Congress instead. Then he retired to Rhode Island and attemptedto convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after beingattractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it alluredno one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he cameback to New York, where his daughter had remained in school. 

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she leftschool; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatreparties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouringthrough her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had no duties, but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some oddtastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious bookswere ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and hadromantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian. Her characterwas never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her fathermight take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times forthe summer. 

The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceasedto be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to servehis country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even atBerne. Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on themission he had expected, decided to go without it. He was really very fitfor both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deservepublic place by public service, he had deserved it. His pessimism wasuncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might wellhave reached the bottom of his nature. 

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parentssuppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children. She did notthink it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would nothave found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin andwent to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father. Shesaid how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort ofplace did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemedto have everything there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs. Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared. 

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one ofthe chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at theChannel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, wherethe Norumbia was to land again. The young people talked across Mrs. Marchto each other, and said how charming the islands were, in theirgray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, likeairy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all the nicer not to knowjust which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, hesuggested that they could see better by going round to the other side ofthe ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off withBurnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her. 

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea. There hadbeen an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first comeaboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and theyshrank from forming others. Then the charm of the idle, eventless lifegrew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitableend. 

Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegrationwere felt in all the once-more-repellant particles. Burnamy and MissTriscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hatedto have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at seaagain; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkationby the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from thehold. 

They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war thatpassed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water. AtCherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very differentin her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-controlof the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the Frenchfortifications much more on show than the English had been. Nothingmarked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joinedthem, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the greatbattle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. The elder coupletried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated thespectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and, leave the young people unmoved. 

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at herwaist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to theyoung men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship. Burnamy wasnot of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leavinghim finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing thewhole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact. Burnamy spent agreat part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed anintolerable resignation to the girl's absence. 

"Yes, " said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, "that terriblepatience of youth!"

"Patience? Folly! Stupidity! They ought to be together every instant! Dothey suppose that life is full of such chances? Do they think that fatehas nothing to do but--"

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

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

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

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

"Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do ordon't do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it'sthat? Is marriage such a very certain good?"

"It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is. What wouldour lives have been without it?" she retorted. 

"Oh, we should have got on. It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought togo round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or anonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don't mindtheir flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. Idoubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law hehadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a younglady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her littlecharm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the otherthings that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellowlike Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame toclimb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You wouldn'twant him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had money, and I doubt if she has much. It's all very pretty to have a girl like herfascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn'taltogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in thevery world she belongs to. I don't think it's for us to promote theaffair. "

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

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

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that shesuffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got throughthe meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the tablefirst, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to theirchairs on deck. 

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

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

"Basil!" she implored. 

"Well, I won't, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I'venever seen a Dutch lugger, and--"

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he wassilent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talkingas if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by. Theywere walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking upinto his face while he talked. 

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

XVII. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What things?"

"Oh--ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics. Heowns shares in everything but the United States Senate--gas, electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers--and now he would like some Senate. That's what I think. "

She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that thiscynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercestaccusals of the country. "How fascinating it is!" she said, innocently. 

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

"In the office?"

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

Burnamy laughed. "I don't believe they envy me. It won't be all roses forme--they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if itisn't. " He remembered something one of his friends in the office had saidof the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried hisbeak on him in the belief that he was soft. 

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

"I don't know, " said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms. "Isuppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there arethings you can't say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse incollege; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March tookthis little piece for 'Every Other Week'. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man--the onlyliterary man--I ever talked with. They must go out--somewhere! Papa mustmeet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I'm making the most ofyou. "

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

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

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

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

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every OtherWeek' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiouslyneglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs. March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to knowjust how much she thought of him as a writer? "Did she like the poem. "

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about thepoem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March'sliking for Burnamy. "But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!" Thiswas not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to hispersonal history. "And you didn't know any one when, you went up toChicago from--"

"Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in theoffice, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing tolet me try my hand. That was all I could ask. "

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

"But women do!" Burnamy retorted. "There is a girl writing on the papernow--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came toChicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's madeher way single-handed from interviewing up. "

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

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

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

"On the paper?"

"Yes. "

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

"What's that?"

"Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes fordishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette. "

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

He laughed reminiscently. "Well, not always. We had one man who used todo it beautifully--when he was sober. The department hasn't had anypermanent head since. "

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and nodoubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. "Doyou know what time we really get in to-morrow?"

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

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

"Are you going direct to Dresden?"

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

"I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that willget me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let mebe of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow. "

"You're very kind. You've been very good already--to papa. " He protestedthat he had not been at all good. "But he's used to taking care ofhimself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!"

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

"I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they'realways other people's. "

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

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she leftthe question. "Do you understand German?"

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

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

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

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

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wonderedwhether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense ofnovelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was thefirst young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; MissTriscoe herself did not awe him so much. 

XVIII. 

The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil anddisorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of theshore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People wentand came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were nolonger careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for amoment. 

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained belowhad to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumberedwith, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast thebedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in thecorridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and peoplewho had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give, anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to givethe head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenbybrought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the headsteward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offeringhim six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not anofficer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted onthe steamers of other nations. 

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summercottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzlemuch like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not beenfor the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fanciedthemselves at home again. 

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream wherethe Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought theirhand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it thatpeople who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledgethem afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transferof the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that everyone sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were all on thetender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways withthe hand-baggage. "Is this Hoboken?" March murmured in his wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversedaction of the kinematograph. 

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among thecompanions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowdedtogether under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashingrain. Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized MissTriscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far fromBurnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whomhe was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was talkingwith Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Addingsat near them tranquilly enjoying her son. 

Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, andafter he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a freshcount that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble;their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyesexpressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must havebeen very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room atthe station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last feewith unexpected cordiality. 

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which thecustoms inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again theywere united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also therestaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors--theshuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous Germanvoices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars. Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with aletter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, "Krahnay, Krahnay!" When March could bear it no longer he went up to him andshouted, "Crane! Crane!" and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry, "Kren! Kren!" But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew. 

People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sendinghome cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbearcabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal oftalking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girlsbehind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then servedthem with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, thoughvoluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire thetravellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitualwith these amiable people. 

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

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

"I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when hesaid at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the railroadsbelong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table, it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's lese-majesty. " Shegave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's face with anappealing smile. 

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

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

"Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anythingdisagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's railroadstation; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on youraccount. "

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

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

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

The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. Marchovertook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on hisshoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face. March triedto tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: "Oh, yes. Iunderstood that. But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother totake any risks. "

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

"Not now, please!" the boy entreated. 

"Well, I'll find another chance, " March assented. He looked round andcaught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; theTriscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but herfather appeared not to see March. "It's all right, with Rose, " he said, when he sat down again by his wife; "but I guess it's all over withBurnamy, " and he told her what he had seen. "Do you think it came to anydispleasure between them last night? Do you suppose he offered himself, and she--"

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

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

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

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogethersurprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow asked if hecould be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in thetrain. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe hedid not seem in a hurry. 

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, "Yes, you cansee that as far as they're concerned. "

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

XIX. 

The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's peoplealone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars. Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strangecorridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossingfrom it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimesrising half-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were verycomfortable; and when the train began to run out through the littlesea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began. Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or floweringvines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here andthere a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually whereit was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with usa generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven. 

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holsteincattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails. Thegray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for theinclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold. Flowers wereblooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a doggedenergy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottagesand even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses weredouble lines of low willows. At the first stop the train made, thepassengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside thestation, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proofthat vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements. But itwas not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly inslices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the Germanaffections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer. 

A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, whichhad broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window. Thisboyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, iftheir sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism, was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia's passengers, andthey met no more in their sea-solidarity. Of their table acquaintance theMarches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking forthem. He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and wasgoing to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg atseven. He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven;Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they were in thesame carriage with the Eltwins. He had got a letter from Mr. Stoller atCuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage rooms for them atthe hotel where he was going to stay with him. 

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of othersin the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seizedupon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishlystruggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors. There was reallyno such haste; but none could govern themselves against the generalfrenzy. With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to winthe attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector. The officer openedone trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then thereensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to goto the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces whichwere to go to the hotel overnight. At last the division was made; theMarches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson andsteaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, wentback into the station. 

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

As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind ofturnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the Germanlands. It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart whichthe women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult. March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had notbeen offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but hiswife would not be amused. She said that no country which suffered such athing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no cityin the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughlytrolleyed as Hamburg. The hum of the electric car was everywhere, andeverywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights ofconnecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they droveto the pleasant little hotel they had chosen. 

XX. 

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, wherestately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus, over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim publicgarden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, andchildren played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer ofthe fatherland. It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was thenovelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, andtheir beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remainimmutably preposterous. They are apparently imagined for the stature ofsleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows aretriangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under thebloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises overthe sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttonedinto the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat. 

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

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner, stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until theywere safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling themup the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward. Helet them get fairly seated before he started the car, and so lost the funof seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each otherfor support. The Germans have so little sense of humor that probably noone in the car would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon thefloor. No one apparently found it droll that the conductor should touchhis cap to them when he asked for their fare; no one smiled at theirefforts to make him understand where they wished to go, and he did notwink at the other passengers in trying to find out. Whenever the carstopped he descended first, and did not remount till the dismountingpassenger had taken time to get well away from it. When the Marches gotinto the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond their street, the conductor would not take their fare. 

The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate theinclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left theshelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way tothe Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did notmind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March'sself-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a stafflike a drum-major's, who left his place at the circus door to get theirtickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then asvisibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as achild would have been. 

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment ranklingin their hearts. "One ought always to overpay them, " March sighed, "and Iwill do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for it. That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we comeout. " As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who showed themto their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought everyconceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by hisremorse. 

"One ought to do it, " he said. "We are of the quality of good geniuses tothese poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in theroad. It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than we. "His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience betweenthem they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus, of allmodern entertainments, seems alone to inspire. The house was full fromfloor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the twoSpanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke theuniversal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into eitherGerman or English. They had missed by an event or two the more patrioticattraction of "Miss Darlings, the American Star, " as she was billed inEnglish, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performanceswhich leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and thepantomimic piece which closed the evening. 

This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayeditself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant whichpurveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany. When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in theright mood to enjoy the allegory of "The Enchanted Mountain's Fantasy;the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the SteepAcclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains, which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of theover-40-feet-high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day'sCircus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the FairyBallet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seenSplendor of Costume. " The Marches were happy in this allegory, andhappier in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent, andwhich here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces ofthe 'coryphees' to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures. They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment, ofgood-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they wouldhave got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a pang. 

They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished, and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not toopoignant. In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their releasefrom the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed asthe psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them. Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europequite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure ofseeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world shehave suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of theCircus Renz. 

In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time inHamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out thetruth, to know why she had not met any others. She had read much of theprevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to pushher off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman, and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it. But shehad been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kindhad happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block inthe city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very fewofficers or military of any kind in Hamburg. 

XXI. 

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the youngGerman friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast. He saidHamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a largeimperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of factthere were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authoritieschose to indulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyfulflutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release frommilitary service. He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a manreprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the illhealth which had got him his release as if it had been the greatestblessing of heaven. He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he shouldbe leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was totake in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them tosay if there were not something that he could do for them. 

"Yes, " said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, whocould think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he wasin Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wantsto look him up everywhere. "

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young manhad apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs. March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but shewas firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came backgladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live inKonigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily knowthe house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waitershared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, andjoined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them intotheir carriage. 

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they shouldsee in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that itrained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with theunfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they badetheir driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that heshould by no means Miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front ofa house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to revere itmore at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than thesick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelestmoment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock, whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly. 

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt, whenhe came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danishgovernment; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking aboutamong the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heinemight have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or anysort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxietyof the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italywould have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the littlecrowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient ofquestion and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay. To aman they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage andblood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of astationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but hehad never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard wherehe lived in Hamburg. 

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, anddrove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which theirlimited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its frontescape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse, and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintnessthat they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done. They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with noapparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down uponthem with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of theirtimber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in bandsquite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high insuccessions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anythingthe travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselvesupon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness whichbrought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were setajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and thetraffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. Theycould not have said which delighted them more--the houses in theimmediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives andthe background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, andthey had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons insome romantic drama. 

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression whichHamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorousactivity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by theturmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of hershipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesquenessof the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, andseemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of thisgained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwardsmade, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. Inthe shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of thegreatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romanticglamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 aquarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United Statesseemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streetsthrough the whole shabby length of Third Avenue. 

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity, that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautifulnew Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; butit was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a publicedifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger. He couldnot get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and whenhe stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet likethe New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; peoplewere not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but theywere all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from theBourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out itsclamor. He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first, examples of modern German art. The custodian led him gently about andsaid which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see howbad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy anyof them. 

XXII. 

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease ofpeople ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the chargeof their baggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (wherethey had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxietiesof European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offeredthemselves for recognition. A porter vanished with their hand-baggagebefore they could note any trait in him for identification; other portersmade away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy histickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help himfind the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain ofalien boxes. One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay asmuch in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrapof paper which recorded their number and destination. The interpreter andthe porters took their fees with a professional effect ofdissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking andeating and drinking in the restaurant. They burst through with the restwhen the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of theporter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent uponescaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had gotvery good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliatedby their needless tumult. 

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthfuljoy in some of the long-estranged facts. The road was rougher than theroads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without theunavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage. Mrs. March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroadswhich she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburgsidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management towardher. Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americansare; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg toLeipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, howeveryoung or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to alady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late tosecure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of thatstage. But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for informationabout changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished tomake sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error. At thepoint where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed witha thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not beenforgotten. She said she could not see how any people could be both soselfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of sayingsomething offensive:

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

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

"Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us howdespicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as humanbeings?"

This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and atlast, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him. Thedarkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its fewsimple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, denselywooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, andcheckered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rainthat from time to time varied the thin sunshine. 

The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was hereand there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, anEnglish-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain asthe seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, andthis accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages. 

She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, andwas going home to Potsdam for a visit. She seemed like a German girl outof 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried toinvest herself with some romantic interest as an American. She failed tomove the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immensebunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to themjust before they left their hotel. She failed, later, on the same groundwith the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage atMagdeburg, and talked over the 'London Illustrated News' with anEnglish-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the factof Mrs. March's nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recallwith fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, andcould make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs bysaying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come acrossthe sea. 

"Yes, " March assented, "but that was a great while ago, and Americanswere much rarer than they are now in Europe. The Italians are so muchmore sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that youwanted to impress them. Heaven knows how little they cared! And then, youwere a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought so. "

"Yes, " she sighed, "and now I'm a plain old woman. "

"Oh, not quite so bad as that. "

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

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

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

"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is livinghere with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I couldimagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way sheclung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of theroyalties to her friend. There is romance for you!"

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up throughthe academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silentexcept for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their felinepurr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense of thepast imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and thehead waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to theendeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms inthe house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they foundthemselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quicksuccession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them. Thespell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of hisconsciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing. Thislinked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent thenext forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotionstinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that sinceit was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finallyrestored to him. 

XXIII. 

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square ofaristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, whichafterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite socharacteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itselfLittle Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the paleyellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarlyassociated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rathermore sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but aquiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was providedwith a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when therain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be in thatsunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it wassufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others. Ithad a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywheredisfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France. Thesemonuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as recordsof the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreignfoe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be. It isnot for the victories of a people that any other people can care. Thewars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, orwhat are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death andsorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them, till time has softened it to a memory

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

It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instantsatiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated theLeipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause ofthe rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the fieldwhere Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (italways took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscoreyears before. Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for thesparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern character ofKaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal function; andMarch was more taken with the notion of the little gardens which hisguide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of Leipsic andenjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes. He saw certain ofthese gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and sometimesfurnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his pleasure inthe evening air, with his family. The guide said he had such a gardenhimself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised vegetablesand flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied that onthe simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him aglimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their characterof victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon. But probably theywould not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on makingthemselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails overnationality. 

He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide wasimaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by threeyears' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned thelanguage, he might not have risen to this. He would have tried, for hewas a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' byprofession. There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing race(which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of theperfected Baedeker, ) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so thatthe Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeperof a small restaurant. He gladly abandoned his business to the care ofhis wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, withstrangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal todo something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when theydismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket hisprophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marblefloor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the wholeplace. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, whoseemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutchor Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and natureof the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragmentsof the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes, how they smelt, that rose from the ruin. 

It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what theywere doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was onthem, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in theirignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They sparedthemselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they feltfalsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties toart and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's makerand one's neighbor. 

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful oldRathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion inpassing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic isredolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in hisquality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quietbeauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking intosuburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals, which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasureboats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequentbridges, even during the drizzle. There seemed to be no churches to do, and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against themthat they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous sceneof Napoleon's first great defeat. 

By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at thelittle inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relicsfrom the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it. Oldmuskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums, gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all themurderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations, autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of allthe other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind, filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with aloud pounding voice and a bad breath. When he wished them to enjoy somegross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte's expense, andput his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible thatMarch left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that theFrench had not won the battle of Leipsic. He walked away musing pensivelyupon the traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of history when a breathcould so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had cleansedhis lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still aBonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground whereNapoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empireslipping through his blood-stained fingers. It was with difficulty thathe could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on thestone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out thenor afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon'sor not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly's. 

While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startledby the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the oppositequarter, and advancing toward them. He wore the imperial crossed by thepointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, andMarch had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the ThirdNapoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his comingruin in the face. 

"Why, it's Miss Triscoe!" cried his wife, and before March had noticedthe approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushedupon each other, and encountered with a kiss. At the same time the visageof the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General Triscoe, whogave March his hand in a more tempered greeting. 

The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting twodays before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distantprospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noblestretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon. 

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had beenon first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven. He might still have been in a poutwith his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; andhe said, "What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have hadsome chance of being civilized under the French. All this unification ofnationalities is the great humbug of the century. Every stupid racethinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set backa hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about;and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up. What a farce it is!What's become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, orthe French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?"

March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put byGeneral Triscoe made it offensive. "I don't know. Isn't it ratherquarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts?The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before themwere. And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peaceis civilization. Perhaps after a great many ages people will cometogether through their real interests, the human interests; but atpresent it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism canunite them. By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it. "

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

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

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

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

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the 'battle ofLeipsic', or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men. For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairson the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now ofgeological remoteness. The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by herfather's having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way ofLeipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come withoutstopping in Hamburg. They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained thewhole day before, and they had not gone out. She asked when Mrs. Marchwas going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next morning; herhusband wished to begin his cure at once. 

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father anygood; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms. 

"Oh, he hasn't any. But I know he can't be well--with his gloomyopinions. "

"They may come from his liver, " said Mrs. March. "Nearly everything ofthat kind does. I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed attimes, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad isthe great place for that, you know. "

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

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

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

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

"I don't suppose I can get papa to go, " said Miss Triscoe, so insincerelythat Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; toCarlsbad with Burnamy--probably on the way from Cuxhaven. She looked upfrom digging the point of her umbrella in the ground. "You didn't meethim here this morning?"

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, "HasMr. Burnamy been here?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did she say that?"

"No, but of course he did. "

"Then it's all settled?"

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

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

"You were trying to look at the last page yourself, " she retorted, andshe would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward theaffair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made himagree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father to Carlsbad was only aquestion of time. 

They parted heart's-friends with their ineffectual guide, who wasaffectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hoteldoor; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a fartherroom when they went down to supper. The waiter, much distracted fromtheir own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfastparty of students which they had heard beginning there about noon. Therevellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they mightnot rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which wereapparently set to music. 

The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of theuniversity town. They pervaded the place, and decorated it with theirfantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corpscaps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue. They were noteasily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of thedull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they weresometimes both students and bicyclers. As bicyclers they kept about inthe rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened, they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times andwaltz in the square before the hotel. At one moment of the holiday somechiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizessat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotelstreamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespatteredwith small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion ofribbons somewhere. It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it wasas tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers athome. 

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning theirdifferent colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husbandfind out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest inthe nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they werenot content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged itin every pleasure and employment of civil life. He estimated, perhaps notvery accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore citizens'dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of thewomen-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women hadtheir peasant costume. 

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of thecity to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom anhour's interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and withthe help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with theeagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed theirassociations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition fromthem. This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by awoman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing aGerman fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slenderyoung girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair ofthe lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon thecommon hire, while the man took the common tip. They made haste to leavethe useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to theColonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like theagreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance. The idea of her colonialprogress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keepingimagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savagesfrom her Central-African possessions. They were getting their supper atthe moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, aroundthe fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they werenot very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when anold man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand andbegan to chase a boy round the camp. The boy was lighter-footed, andeasily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket. None of theother Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waitingfor the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled awayto another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselveswith the image of Old Leipsic. 

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

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happybeyond the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a specialinterest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, andgenially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous. From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remountedthe car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy withan innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyousphysiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth. 

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiencesand impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of asa serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guidehad said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's contentwith his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he becamequite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, orseemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, andwere rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kindhearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able to note, rathermore freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a verynervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to anagitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted. Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier andguests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefullyas soon as some simple question of train-time was solved. The encountersalways left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must witha man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned himself after one of them asthe victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise. "Itis a life of excitements, but not of movements, " he explained to March;and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not goto Carlsbad too. "For sugar?" he asked, as if there were overmuch of itin his own make. 

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

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

XXV. 

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning inAmerica. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by thetelegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, sayingthat their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits wereas light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when theirtrain drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape allthe way to Carlsbad. A fatherly 'traeger' had done his best to get themthe worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded sopoorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a motherand daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together. Theircompartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as thesewere twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after Marchhad got a window open it did not matter, really. 

He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented intheirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and theelder lady said in English, "Let me show you, " and came to his help. 

The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed todifferent car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear, and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhapsthey were the more affected because it presently appeared that they hadcousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted withan American family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likes to dothese things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a familyof intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken, abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they entered into acomparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from which it seemedthat the objects and interests of cultivated people in Berlin were quitethe same as those of cultivated people in New York. Each of the partiesto the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their respectivecivilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm and virtueto the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one anotherthat when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad, themother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she hadadmired. In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowingspeechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude. 

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

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

"Ah, that's the difference! A Berliner could do it, and a Bostoniancouldn't. Do you think it so much better to have the courage of yourconvictions?"

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

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

"Well?"

"That was to your pretty youth. Now the gracious stranger gives you afolding stool. "

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

"You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flowerthat time; I noticed it. I didn't see that you looked so very different. To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; butrosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;they will keep in any climate. "

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

"I don't think it gets much fun out of it, " he assented. 

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

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alikeeverywhere. It's the expression of the common civilization of the world. When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then foundthat it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether I was athome or abroad. And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this trainwhich had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I didn'tknow but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot. To be sure, Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder atEger, and so that came to the same thing. It's these confounded fifty-oddyears. I used to recollect everything. "

He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, whichhad not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they hadcrossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morning and earlyafternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men werecradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrowfields between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger, there wassomething more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the lowhills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted amountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations wereshabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in thescenery and the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches ofthe streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were liftingwater for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Alongthe embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women wereat work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girlswere lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. Atan up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to thechildren the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage inGermany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the questionwhether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him. He satdown feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who hadtricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, andtried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic idealexpressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows, which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, andnow in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself. She refused to sharein the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by theplacarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to takeaway the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, withthat sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one whoprofits by travel. 

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars Calm of those who have logic on their side Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance Explained perhaps too fully Futility of travel Humanity may at last prevail over nationality Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all Our age caricatures our youth Prices fixed by his remorse Recipes for dishes and diseases Reckless and culpable optimism Repeated the nothings they had said already She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine Wilful sufferers Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests Work he was so fond of and so weary of