called him back in time to sell it to him.

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged
with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy
'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be so
finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of
the popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March
heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined
the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the
silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and
poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade
of the Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its
steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of
iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There
is an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising
till bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already
playing; and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the
multitude shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips,
and then taking each his place in the interminable line moving on to
replenish them at the spring.

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate
is said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took
his eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats
of plush or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their
ears. They were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black,
but they seemed all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last
at Carlsbad is that its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich.
After the Polish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race were the most
striking figures. There were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were
striking in their way too; and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers
and soldiers brightened the picture. Here and there a southern face,
Italian or Spanish or Levantine, looked passionately out of the mass of
dull German visages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other
gentile nation, are to the fore. Their misfits, their absence of style,
imparted the prevalent effect; though now and then among the women a
Hungarian, or Pole, or Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which
seeks beauty and grace rather than the domestic virtues. There were
cert