ers wept founded this image of stone.

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of the
German soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war with
Austria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon
should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September
mist, which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest
reaches; for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks
are apt to be in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through
it, and sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and
said how much seemed to be done in Germany for the people's comfort and
pleasure. In what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly
theirs, they were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially
the children seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things.
The Marches met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly
back by the winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park,
and they found them everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed
subdued, and were silent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in
the streets of Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part
of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and
cackled at each other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps
they were indeed children of that sad second childhood which one would
rather not blossom back into.

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and
shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we
choose. But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second
childhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there, people do not joke
above their breath about kings and emperors. If they joke about them
in print, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are
severely enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious
as well as comic. Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out
in every walk of life, and it is said that in family jars a husband
sometimes has the last word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming
the sovereign, and so having her silenced for three months at least
behind penitential bars.

"Think," said March, "how simply I could adjust any differences of
opinion between us in Dusseldorf."

"Don't!" his wife implored wit