take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them
to say if there were not something that he could do for them.

"Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who
could think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was
in Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants
to look him up everywhere."

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man
had apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs.
March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but
she was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came
back gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in
Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know
the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter
shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and
joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into
their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should
see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it
rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the
unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade
their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that
he should by no means Miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in
front of a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to
revere it more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer
than the sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his
cruelest moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet
Klopstock, whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt,
when he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish
government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about
among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where
Heine might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat,
or any sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the
anxiety of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors
in Italy would have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the
little crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient
of question and kind in