he best ones among them. Here!" He drew a newspaper out of his pocket,
folded to show two columns in their full length, and handed it to
Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to run his eye
over it. "You tell me what you think of that. I've put it out for a kind
of a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just thought I'd let
our people see how a city can be managed on business principles."

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while
he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so
entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the
breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of
harvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serried
stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight as
stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky of
unwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men
were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding,
alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of
beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land. In the
meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls
lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter
labor of ordering the load. From the upturned earth, where there ought to
have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose. But they
could not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine with
colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmed
in the forests on the far-off mountains. Nearer and farther, the cottages
and villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the
distant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with a
sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood,
where he lost the sense of his wife's presence, and answered her vaguely.
She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of
absent-minded men learn to resign themselves. They were both roused from
their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe. He was handing back the
folded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him over
his glasses, "I should like to see what your contemporaries have to say
to all that."

"Well, sir," Stoller returne