ack to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy
beyond the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a special
interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and
genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.
From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted
the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with
an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous
physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences
and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as
a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide
had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content
with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became
quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or
seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and
were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind
hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able to note, rather
more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a very
nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to an
agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted.
Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier and
guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefully
as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved. The encounters
always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with
a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned himself after one of them as
the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise. "It
is 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 go
to Carlsbad too. "For sugar?" he asked, as if there were overmuch of it
in 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 ground
with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in
America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the
telegram which the portier sent after the Marches