d took March's mind off the
scenery with a sudden wrench when he came unexpectedly into view after a
momentary disappearance. At the table d'hote, which was served when the
landscape began to be less interesting, the guests were expected to hand
their plates across the table to the stewards but to keep their knives
and forks throughout the different courses, and at each of these partial
changes March felt the young man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him
for the semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that
he was a Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at
last cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their
former Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love
mantled the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled
steeps. The scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered;
there were certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander
than they remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows
the poem was more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory
chimneys, though there were no compensating castles near it; and the
castles seemed as good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of
them had been restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who
had gone into trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and
then such a mere gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put
his tongue to the broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the
first American dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more,
does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on
the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which
might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still
you know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not
the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.
Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be
storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really
got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure."

"Well, we have got no denkmal, either," said his wife, meaning the
national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had
just passe