the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a special
interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and
genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.
From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted
the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with
an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous
physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences
and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of
as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their
guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's
content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he
became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted
him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat
better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as
large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was
able to note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the
Germans were a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least
cause gave way to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was
violent while it lasted. Several times that day he had seen encounters
between the portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but
which ended peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was
solved. The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring,
as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned
himself after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which
he could take no exercise. "It is a life of excitements, but not of
movements," he explained to March; and when he learned where he was
going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too. "For sugar?"
he asked, as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, "No; liver."

"Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground
with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning
in America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the
telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying
that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were