a
surfeit of highhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and
canopies, the tapestries, the historical associations with the margraves
and their marriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon.
The Great Napoleon's man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters
when he occupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his
arrangements for taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over
to Bavaria, with whom it still remains. Twice the Great Frederick had
sojourned in the palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the
Wild Margrave, and more than once it had welcomed her next neighbor
and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic
voice, piercingly plaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the
air. Here, oddly enough, the spell of the Wild Margrave weakened in the
presence of his portrait, which signally failed to justify his fame of
furious tyrant. That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular
and historical conception of him than the impression he made upon his
exalted contemporaries. The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could
so far excuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say: "The
Margrave of Ansbach... was a young prince who had been very badly
educated. He continually ill-treated my sister; they led the life of cat
and dog. My sister, it is true, was sometimes in fault.... Her education
had been very bad... She was married at fourteen."

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he would easily have
known them for Americans by the handsome fee they gave him; they
came away flown with his praise; and their national vanity was again
flattered when they got out into the principal square of Ansbach.
There, in a bookseller's window, they found among the pamphlets teaching
different languages without a master, one devoted to the Amerikanische
Sprache as distinguished from the Englische Sprache. That there could be
no mistake, the cover was printed with colors in a German ideal of
the star-spangled banner; and March said he always knew that we had a
language of our own, and that now he was going in to buy that pamphlet
and find out what it was like. He asked the young shop-woman how it
differed from English, which she spoke fairly well from having lived
eight years in Chicago. She said that it differed from the English
mainly in emphasis and pronunciation. "For instance, the English say
'HALF past', and the Americans 'Half PAST