rd Napoleon. But probably they
would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on making
themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over
nationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was
imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three
years' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the
language, he might not have risen to this. He would have tried, for he
was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' by
profession. There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing race
(which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the
perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that
the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper
of a small restaurant. He gladly abandoned his business to the care of
his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with
strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal to
do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they
dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his
prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble
floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole
place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who
seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch
or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature
of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments
of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,
how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they
were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on
them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their
ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared
themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt
falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to
art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's maker
and one's neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old
Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in
passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is
redolent of printin