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

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

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

XX.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where
stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus,
over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim
public garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat,
and children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer
of the fatherland. It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was
the novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans,
and their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain
immutably preposterous. They are apparently imagined for the stature
of sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are
triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the
bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over
the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neat