loud-voiced,
iron-jawed. One of her favorite boasts was that she had never been
to a dentist. She pulled out her rarely aching teeth, or some one of
the family pulled them for her.

The Herr could be smoother and he assumed a fatherly solicitude over
Gard, looking out for his advantages, anxious that he should make
progress. But Bucher evidently was annoyed at times by not having
authority in the matter of the slow way in which his young guest set
about with his "studies." Kirtley had not come to study, had not
been trained to study, in the German sense. It would have been
difficult to make the old man see any virtue in such desultoriness.
It doubtless proved to his mind that Americans are only half
trained, half tamed, half domesticated.

The couple surrounded Kirtley with a protection, an honesty, a
reliability, a zeal, that was as surprising as it was, on the whole,
gratifying. He felt a security he had hardly known in his own home.
If he were cheated or otherwise imposed upon anywhere in
Dresden--and this did not often happen--the Buchers were violently
up in arms about it and never ceased pursuit of the recreant until
the wrong was righted.

"The good German name must not be tarnished."

In a word, they tried to treat him like a son; and so forceful and
constant were their efforts in this direction that he sometimes
wished their well-meant attentions were less formidable. The easy
American "forget it," "why bother," "never again," were expressions
of a mood unfamiliar to them. They visibly had small patience with
such slackness which only, to their minds, encouraged lawlessness.

The setting for Gard's approaching German love affair was
appropriately picturesque and propitious. A tight little meadow,
with a grassy path wandering through by the Elbe, lay near at hand,
and beyond, at the right, a pine wood--the Waldpark--with neat
graveled walks and rustic seats where the tonic air was often to
brace his musings.

Adjacent was the small summer house, still poetically standing,
where Schiller wrote "Don Carlos" a century and a quarter before. A
leafy lane led from the meadow to the walled garden inclosure of
Villa Elsa, whose branches, vines and flowering bushes insisted
on making it almost a hidden retreat. The spot could not be more
_gemuetlich_--that familiar expressive word which Kirtley soon
learned to rely on amid the scant artillery of his defensive
weapons of conversational German.

Through a swingi