ased the lingering
conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then
she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
lands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were
not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses,
were locked against tourist curiosity.

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this
ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual
picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were
fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets
to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the
evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some
question of their way. He answered in English, and in the parley that
followed they discovered that they were all Americans. The stranger
proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said he
had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he had
taken on Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New York, and now
a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and
deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers,
and joined them is a common interest. The German-American said he was
bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and
he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of
German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He said that the
Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this
tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy. He
warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;
beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with
us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. The
working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other
quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and as
he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting
together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such
Americanism as they had in common. He had reverted to an entirely German
effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a
type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland wit