e of this
gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards
made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. In
the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the
greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic
glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a
quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States
seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets
through 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 beautiful
new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but
it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public
edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger. He could
not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when
he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like
the New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; people
were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but they
were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the
Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its
clamor. He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first,
examples of modern German art. The custodian led him gently about and
said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how
bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any
of them.

XXII.

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of
people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge
of their baggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where
they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties
of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered
themselves for recognition. A porter vanished with their hand-baggage
before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters
made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his
tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him
find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of
alien boxes. One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as
much in freigh