bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should
be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to
take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to
say if there were not something that he could do for them.

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

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man
had 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 she
was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back
gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in
Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know
the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter
shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and
joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into
their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should
see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it
rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the
unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade
their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he
should by no means Miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of
a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to revere it
more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the
sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest
moment, 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, when
he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish
government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about
among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine
might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any
sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety
of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy
would have been. There was no eager and