own arrangement with justice. When he overcharges
his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my
clock."

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the
clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine
as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. The
smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not
so bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March
liked the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy
shores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that,
and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he
remembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began to
come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence,
assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid
from the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the
color of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not
gainsay the friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they
showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since
realized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held
silently apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who
kept the Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an
Englishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was
he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or
was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?
He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of
the boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed
to offer him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually
lifted a shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was
English and that he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial
glint in the young man's eye, or at some petrific expression of his
delicate face, he felt that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let
the shawl sink again. March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing
the Germans begin to eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards
either from the baskets they had brought with them, or from the boat's
provision. But he prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer,
through all the events of the voyage; an