mense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put
on for their passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy
slippers were designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and
upon the mixed company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree
humiliating. The women's skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the
men were openly put to shame, and they shuffled forward with their
bodies at a convenient incline like a company of snow-shoers. In the
depths of his own abasement March heard a female voice behind him
sighing in American accents, "To think I should be polishing up these
imperial floors with my republican feet!"

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his
own heart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in the
historical order of the family portraits recording the rise of the
Prussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors. He began to realize here
the fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is not
the effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity. There is
nothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodies
and proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of French
art it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pride
in the German triumph over the French in war. March found it tiresome
beyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense
of it with his felt shoes. "Well," he confided to his wife when they
were fairly out-of-doors, "if Prussia rose in the strength of silence,
as Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and
tall talk."

"Yes, isn't she!" Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire for
excess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerly
about her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which
ought to have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly
because the troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were
hardly more in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington.
Again the German officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when
she met them on the side-walks. There were scarcely any of them,
and perhaps that might have been the reason why they were not more
aggressive; but a whole company of soldiers marching carelessly up to
the palace from the Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as
our own militia often puts on, regarded her