ut the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and
the Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which
they remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at
Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who
kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling
that she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver
wedding journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think
that it would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do
in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of
the same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in
Europe as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape.
One gray little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its
mediaeval walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something
more. There was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in
places a pale fog began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose
without dispersing the cold, which was afterwards so severe in
their room at the Russischer Hof in Frankfort that in spite of
the steam-radiators they sat shivering in all their wraps till
breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored
the portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all
the electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest
degree. Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they
vowed each other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at
least while the summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and
electric-lighted. They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath,
and over their breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a
certain interest in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel.
They were fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before,
and they were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire.
Many of them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and
girls running before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus
processions have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with
cruel anxiety a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to
a milk-cart before the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his
voice, and called to the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost
shook him from