storied,
gray-stuccoed buildings that might be dwellings, or might be offices,
all showing some traces of feminine taste and supervision in a flower
or a curtain that belied the legended "Comptoir," or "Direction," over
their portals. Mr. Clinch thought of Boston and State Street, of New
York and Wall Street, and became coldly contemptuous.

Yet there was clearly nothing to do but to walk down the formal rows of
chestnuts that lined the broad Strasse, and then walk back again. At the
corner of the first cross-street he was struck with the fact that two
men who were standing in front of a dwelling-house appeared to be as
inconsistent, and out of proportion to the silent houses, as were the
actors on a stage to the painted canvas thoroughfares before which they
strutted. Mr. Clinch usually had no fancies, had no eye for quaintness;
besides, this was not a quaint nor romantic district, only an entrepot
for silks and velvets, and Mr. Clinch was here, not as a tourist, but as
a purchaser. The guidebooks had ignored Sammtstadt, and he was too
good an American to waste time in looking up uncatalogued curiosities.
Besides, he had been here once before,--an entire day!

One o'clock. Still a full hour and a half before his friend would
return to business. What should he do? The Verein where he had once
been entertained was deserted even by its waiters; the garden, with its
ostentatious out-of-door tables, looked bleak and bare. Mr. Clinch was
not artistic in his tastes; but even he was quick to detect the affront
put upon Nature by this continental, theatrical gardening, and turned
disgustedly away. Born near a "lake" larger than the German Ocean,
he resented a pool of water twenty-five feet in diameter under that
alluring title; and, a frequenter of the Adirondacks, he could scarce
contain himself over a bit of rock-work twelve feet high. "A country,"
said Mr. Clinch, "that--" but here he remembered that he had once seen
in a park in his native city an imitation of the Drachenfels in plaster,
on a scale of two inches to the foot, and checked his speech.

He turned into the principal allee of the town. There was a long white
building at one end,--the Bahnhof: at the other end he remembered a
dye-house. He had, a year ago, met its hospitable proprietor: he would
call upon him now.

But the same solitude confronted him as he passed the porter's lodge
beside the gateway. The counting-house, half villa, half factory, must
have co