up. It was to this horse's back that Heine
clambered when a small boy, to see the French take formal possession
of Dusseldorf; and he clung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who
had just abdicated, while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the
balcony of the Rathhaus, and the Electoral arms were taken down from its
doorway.

The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothic and French rococo as
to its architectural style, and is charming in its way, but the Marches
were in the market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine's boyhood.
They felt that he might have been the boy who stopped as he ran before
them, and smacked the stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an
old market-woman, and then dashed away before she could frame a protest
against the indignity. From this incident they philosophized that the
boys of Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century as
they were at the beginning; and they felt the fascination that such a
bounteous, unkempt old marketplace must have for the boys of any period.
There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the
fruits were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The
market-place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down
from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a
slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the
rapid current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over,
while a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw to
open.

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy to grow up in, and
how many privileges it offered, how many dangers, how many chances
for hairbreadth escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushed
shrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Rhine with other boys;
and they easily found a leaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in
the Public Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his
life and saved the kitten's. They were not so sure of the avenue through
which the poet saw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white
horse when he took possession of the Elector's dominions. But if it was
that where the statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. comes riding on a horse
led by two Victories, both poet and hero are avenged there on the
accomplished fact. Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the
badness of that foolish denkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden
Germany), and