ler, Mrs. March owned, than even
Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like that, with double
rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign of
Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restriction
against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred. Otherwise they had to
confess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more proper
and dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America.
To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years'
start; but all the same the fact galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their
hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to
Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something
tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with
its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the
spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the
river's brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold
braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to
his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain have
had them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very
slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower,
and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of the
serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All these
retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove,
without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms,
and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant, not
because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of
wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange
demand.

"What!" she cried. "A fire in September!"

"Yes," March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by
the exigency, "yes, if September is cold."

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or
liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a
word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and in
less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least
sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. March
made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said sh