t day, and the travellers
could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of
the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they
were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty
of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked
in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a
half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing
in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost,
and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this
cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other
fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the
easier part she had chosen. His only definite impression at the cathedral
seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he
had seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object of
interest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs.
March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadth
of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of the
morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of many
Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves to
learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it was
so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with its
bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They liked the
market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full of
fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because
there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedeker
that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the
marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews
had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They were
almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in
Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race,
prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner
so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and
electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran
Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. It
grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in th