her
with no apparent sense of anomaly.

"What do you think of that?" asked Mrs. March. "I think it's good
exercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fat
fellows at the window. I suppose she'll saw the wood in the cellar, and
then lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves' dressing-rooms."

"Don't laugh! It's too disgraceful."

"Well, I don't know! If you like, I'll offer these gentlemen across the
way your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller."

"I wish you'd offer my opinion of them. They've been staring in here
with an opera-glass."

"Ah, that's a different affair. There isn't much going on in Ansbach,
and they have to make the most of it."

The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set at
right angles with them, and nothing which went on in the streets was
lost. Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare moments
they lay full of sun. At such times the Marches were puzzled by the
sight of citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they had
forgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the brief
respites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to dry
them; and some other sights remained baffling to the last. Once a man
with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidly
after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows;
but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew.
Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station: a young
man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking old
woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting question
whether she was the young man's servant in her best clothes, or merely
his mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being
men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression
of the courtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of
the margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In the little
ex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborly interest
in the curiosity of strangers which endears Italian witness. The
white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom
to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a
street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet
skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to
show them t