better for the little outing! Under his breath, he
confounded this lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let
her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were
always so careful of you. She made her husband agree with her, and it
came out that he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and
the Norumbia. He volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital
sea-boat; she did not have her nose under water all the time; she was
steady as a rock; and the captain and the kitchen were simply out of
sight; some people did call her unlucky.

"Unlucky?" Mrs. March echoed, faintly. "Why do they call her unlucky?"

"Oh, I don't know. People will say anything about any boat. You know she
broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice."

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she
parted gayly with this over-good young couple. As soon as they were
gone, March knew that she would say: "You must change that ticket, my
dear. We will go in the Norumbia."

"Suppose I can't get as good a room on the Norumbia?"

"Then we must stay."

In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at
all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question
them up about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard she was
called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history.
They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly
patient of Mrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying
conviction of their insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms
were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked
through his passenger list with a shaking head. He was afraid there was
nothing they would like.

"But we would take anything," she entreated, and March smiled to think
of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of
not going.

"We merely want the best," he put in. "One flight up, no noise or dust,
with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days."

They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do
not understand, in the foreign steamship offices. The clerk turned
unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in
German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part
of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker. A brief
drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a