ld only welcome them to an
apartment where a canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plastered
wall. The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably out to try and
place them at the Elephant. But the Elephant was full, and the Russian
Court was full too. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethought
himself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but very nice,
where they might get rooms, and after the delay of an hour, they got
a carriage and drove away from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord
continued to the last as benevolent as if they had been a profit instead
of a loss to him.

The streets of the town at nine o'clock were empty and quiet, and they
instantly felt the academic quality of the place. Through the pale night
they could see that the architecture was of the classic sentiment which
they were destined to feel more and more; at one point they caught a
fleeting glimpse of two figures with clasped hands and half embraced,
which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller; and when they
mounted to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they passed
under a fresco representing Goethe and four other world-famous poets,
Shakspere, Milton, Tasso, and Schiller. The poets all looked like
Germans, as was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them; he
marshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller brought up the rear
and kept them from going astray in an Elysium where they did not speak
the language. For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite American
freshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, and
provided with steam-radiators. In the sense of its homelikeness the
Marches boasted that they were never going away from it.

In the morning they discovered that their windows looked out on
the grand-ducal museum, with a gardened space before and below its
classicistic bulk, where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers
were full of sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares, March
strolled up through the town; but Weimar was as much awake at that hour
as at any of the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets, where
he encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual
mood. He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have
shunned: a 'denkmal' of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad
as most German monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all
patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dog team. In