and
would make a merit of reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord,
and in the end they would be mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer
this wrong they agreed to restore it to its place, and, let it go to
destruction upon its own terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had
found it, and they went to bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in
Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal
joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his
window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of
pathos in the line:

"Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!"

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of
youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places,
with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen
silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he
remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he
woke early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though
young, were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp
of hooves kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw
the street filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on
horseback, some in uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps,
loosely straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could
not make out. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he
said that these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late
manoeuvres, and who were now going home. He promised March a translation
of the song, but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful
home-going remained the more poetic with him because its utterance
remained inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering
about the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit
by the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to the
cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there
added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people
of Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it by
preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral,
an ugly baroque altar, which was every