walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost
the only vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan
world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black
gabardines, with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their
black velvet derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests
in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and
Cossacks in Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of
western Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were
English, French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going
and coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the
bright walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables,
served by pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants
across the way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops
full of silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and
all the idle frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris,
and they suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no
place else in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of
other cities at certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its
habitual effect.

"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs.
March saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She
was ready to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his
interest had got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied
in her the passion for size which is at the bottom of every American
heart, and which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the
peoples. We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we
are not ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger
than ours, we are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether
different way, was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and
when Burnamy told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a
day in