this relief, thronged with men and horses, the
gala-life of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed
himself after enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality
which seems the final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.

XLVI.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal
of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understood
the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering
conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then
she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
lands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they
were not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran
uses, were locked against tourist curiosity.

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in
this ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual
picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were
fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the
streets to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited
the evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some
question of their way. He answered in English, and in the parley that
followed they discovered that they were all Americans. The stranger
proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said
he had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he
had taken on Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New York, and
now a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and
deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers,
and joined them is a common interest. The German-American said he was
bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and
he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of
German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He said that the
Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this
tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy. He
warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;
beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with
us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. The
working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each othe