berg, and the next morning he went out before
breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope
of intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk
from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew
themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect
of tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs
jolted over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long
procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian
blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their
glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms. But he could not feel that these
things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered
his retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief
book-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he
wanted, and more local histories than he should ever read. He made a
last effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking
clerk if there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg,
and the clerk said there was not one.

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make his
meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to
listen to them. She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table
near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof
against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through.
The bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little
Bavarian lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty
and as little, but delicately blond. Nature had admirably mated them,
and if art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the
bride's mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as
fitly. Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and
how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented,
in his personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his
eyes without protest. But later, when they met the lovers in the street,
walking arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloating upon
their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed
of such folly. She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of
ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome
as most other marriages, and yet she was aband