soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed
him her plan, which she had been working out ever since she woke. It
contained every place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined
not one should escape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition,
accusing him of having taken cold when he got up in the night, and
acquitting him with difficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a
little fagged, and they must have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little
Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way
from his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the
outside before they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the
cleanest of the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty.
Below the houses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is
a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows;
above, where the Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a
frame-maker displayed their signs.

But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked so
fresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it
the poet's birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by the
people who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, so
anomalously interested in the place. They dismounted, and crossed to the
butcher shop where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but could
not understand their wish to go up stairs. He did not try to prevent
them, however, and they climbed to the first floor above, where a
placard on the door declared it private and implored them not to knock.
Was this the outcome of the inmate's despair from the intrusion of other
pilgrims who had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms? They durst not
knock and ask so much, and they sadly descended to the ground-floor,
where they found a butcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence
than the butcher himself, who told them that the building in front was
as new as it looked, and the house where Heine was really born was the
old house in the rear. He showed them this house, across a little court
patched with mangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wished to visit
it he led the way. The place was strewn both underfoot and overhead with
feathers; it had once been all a garden out to the street, the boy said,
but from these feathers, as well as the odor which prevailed, and the
anxio