l, till the
little English boy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March's spirits certainly did not rise
when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at
another table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he
had met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the
elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the
younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed
to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct
and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style
bragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeable
fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had
become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one
only the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in
his scorn of the German landscape, the German weather, the German
government, the German railway management, and then turned out an
American of German birth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort
when he went back to her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she
had discovered standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was
a French clock, of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the
first Empire, and it looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon
occupied Mayence early in the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely
on her conscience where, in its danger from the heat of the stove, it
rested with the weight of the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled.
She wondered that no one had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and
she required her husband to remove it at once from the top of the stove
to the mantel under the mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a
clock. He said nothing could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began
to fall all apart, like a clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble
base dropped-off; its pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side.
While Mrs. March lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it
together before any one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new
place. Then they both breathed freer, and returned to sit down before
the stove. But at the same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined
on the lacquered top, the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would
see it in the morning; she would notice the removal of the clock,