iged to overlook, or seem to accept, a familiarity that was
distasteful, rather than be laughed at for prudishness or ignorance. But
the incident was exceptional. Indeed, it was particularly notable to my
American eyes to find such decorum where there might easily have been
the greatest license. I am afraid that an American mob of this class
would have scarcely been as orderly and civil under the circumstances.
They might have shown more humor; but there would have probably been
more effrontery: they might have been more exuberant; they would
certainly have been drunker. I did not notice a single masquerader
unduly excited by liquor: there was not a word or motion from the
lighter sex that could have been construed into an impropriety. There
was something almost pathetic to me in this attempt to wrest gayety and
excitement out of these dull materials; to fight against the blackness
of that wintry sky, and the stubborn hardness of the frozen soil, with
these painted sticks of wood; to mock the dreariness of their poverty
with these flaunting raiments. It did not seem like them, or rather,
consistent with my idea of them. There was incongruity deeper than their
bizarre externals; a half-melancholy, half-crazy absurdity in their
action, the substitution of a grim spasmodic frenzy for levity, that
rightly or wrongly impressed me. When the increasing gloom of the
evening made their figures undistinguishable, I turned into the first
cross-street. As I lifted my hat to my persistent young friend with the
Pritsche, I fancied she looked as relieved as myself. If, however, I
was mistaken; if that child's pathway through life be strewn with rosy
recollections of the unresisting back of the stranger American; if any
burden, O Gretchen! laid upon thy young shoulders, be lighter for the
trifling one thou didst lay upon mine,--know, then, that I, too, am
content.

And so, day by day, has my Spion reflected the various changing forms
of life before it. It has seen the first flush of spring in the broad
allee, when the shadows of tiny leaflets overhead were beginning to
checker the cool, square flagstones. It has seen the glare and fulness
of summer sunshine and shadow, the flying of November gold through the
air, the gaunt limbs, and stark, rigid, death-like whiteness of winter.
It has seen children in their queer, wicker baby-carriages, old men and
women, and occasionally that grim usher of death, in sable cloak and
cocked hat,--a bal