abroad for a year and get a fresh
and stout hold on the future. Rebner, through his connections, had
been able to arrange for a home in Saxony for his pupil's sojourn.
It was in "a highly estimable and well-informed family" who had
never taken a paying guest. Although a new experience for them, they
had urgently insisted that they would do everything they could to
make his stay agreeable and beneficial. This was deemed most lucky.
For the real German character and existence could there be observed
and lived with the best profit, uncontaminated by the intermixture
of doubtful foreign associations.

And so Gard had arrived in Dresden, in whose attractive suburb of
Loschwitz, on the gently rising banks of the Elbe, the worthy
Buchers were domiciled. As his limping German did not give him
confidence about the up-and-down variety of the Saxon dialect, he
did not venture this afternoon to find his way by tram to the house.
The blind German script in which his hosts' solicitous and minute
instructions were couched, and the funny singsong of the natives
talking blatantly about him, made him feel still more helpless. He
sought refuge in an open droschke. He could then, too, enjoy the
drive across the city.

The Saxon capital sits capaciously like a comfortable old dowager
fully dressed in stuffs of a richly dull color. Her thick skirts are
spread about her with a contented dignity which does not interfere
with her eating large sandwiches openly and vigorously at the opera.
To-day the mellow sunlight crowned her ancient nobleness with a
becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through
the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park,
all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal
palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet
lineaments shone down in almost every American parlor Gard knew.

The dingy baroque architecture, whose general tastelessness was
heavily banked up by a multitude of towers, gables and high copings,
suggested an old-fashioned residential city of the days of urban
fortifications. The uniform arrays of buildings, all pretending to
the effect of sumptuousness thickened by weighty proportions and
blasphemed by rococo hesitations and doubts, seemed constructed to
exalt the doughty glory of Augustus the Strong--Dresden's local
Thor, its chief heroic figure in the favorite Teuton galaxy of
muscled Titans. Somber medieval squares, blocked