he historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered
in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold. Then she
abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried
to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her. He
returned shivering, after a half-hour's absence, and pretended that she
had missed the greatest thing in the world, but as he could never be got
to say just what she had lost, and under the closest cross-examination
could not prove that this cathedral was memorably different from
hundreds of other fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a
lasting content with the easier part she had chosen. His only definite
impression at the cathedral seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of
gloomily correct type, whom he had seen doing it with his Baedeker,
and not letting an object of interest escape; and his account of her
fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the
breadth of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the
rest of the morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the
outside of many Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble
themselves to learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it,
because it was so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful
with its bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They
liked the market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was
full of fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but
because there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their
Baedeker that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to
enter the marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances
that the Jews had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since.
They were almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere
else in Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of
the race, prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a
mid-day dinner so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating
and electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence,
and ran Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder
climate. It grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their
compartment to whom March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the