the little
crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of
question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay. To a
man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and
blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a
stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but he
had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where
he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and
drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their
limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front
escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,
and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness
that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.
They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no
apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon
them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their
timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in bands
quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in
successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything
the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves
upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which
brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set
ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the
traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They
could not have said which delighted them more--the houses in the
immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and
the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and
they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in
some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which
Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous
activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the
turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her
shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness
of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and
seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this
gained st