his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the
morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not
wet. What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an
old town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new
town, handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets,
apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course
Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing
absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive
characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight.
Some sort of monument to the national victory over France there must
have been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no
record of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware
of gardened squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of
dignified civic edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station,
such as the state builds even in minor European cities, but such as our
paternal corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They
went to the Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks
at their public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from
the most plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they
must pay their devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal
banking-house they revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter
of credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius
of Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled
himself by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled
Mrs. March for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the
Rothschilds' birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe
was born. The public is apparently much more expected there, and in the
friendly place they were no doubt much more welcome than they would
have been in the Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy
moment of Weimar, which after the lapse of a week seemed already so
remote. They wondered, as they mounted the stairs from the basement
opening into a clean little court, how Burnamy was getting on, and
whether it had yet come to that understanding between him and Agatha,
which Mrs. March, at least, had meant to be inevitable. Then they became
part of some such sight-seeing retinue as followed the