length, and
handed it to Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to
run his eye over it. "You tell me what you think of that. I've put it
out for a kind of a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just
thought I'd let our people see how a city can be managed on business
principles."

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while
he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so
entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the
breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields
of harvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the
serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew
straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened
under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye,
which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices
were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and
breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed
land. In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy
rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving
themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load. From the upturned
earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few
sombre ravens rose. But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it
smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of
the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains.
Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or
glimmered through the veils of the distant haze. Over all breathed the
keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which
charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his
wife's presence, and answered her vaguely. She talked contentedly on in
the monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign
themselves. They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of
General Triscoe. He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller,
and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, "I should like to
see what your contemporaries have to say to all that."

"Well, sir," Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you.
They got my instructions over there to send everything to me."

B