their helpless response, but they were not gay.
To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and
blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a
stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but
he had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard
where he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and
drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their
limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front
escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,
and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness
that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.
They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no
apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon
them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their
timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in
bands quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high
in successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than
anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted
themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely
minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows;
windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from
within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their
progress. They could not have said which delighted them more--the
houses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the
perspectives and the background; but all were like the painted scenes
of the stage, and they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they
were not persons in some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which
Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous
activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the
turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her
shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness
of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and
seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this
gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards
made, and assisted the digestion of s