lways blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the square and
flashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight. The same hollow
groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the spectators as had
welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his fellow-townsmen, with
the same effect of being the conventional cries of a stage mob behind the
scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy
face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored
if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply
fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in
acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March that
sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a
scantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly working
toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference
between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic and
dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European,
it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate conviction of
equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity transcending
all social and civic pretences, was what gave their theatrical effect to
the shows of deference from low to high, and of condescension from high
to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince did
not play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harder
part to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from being
found out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across the
stage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid
to be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor
supernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle
like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an
hour and a half for half a minute's glimpse of the imperial party, March
now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to
still greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come to
Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in
itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train,
and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a
multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? He
was, in f