ld Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an
ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive
offerings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled
themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and
ragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red
guide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle in
a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own
ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar a
priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was
as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle's, or whether somewhere in it he
felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and
old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river,
which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough river
looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both
as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making. The summer
of life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better return to his
own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal
town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any
one. A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really
a wish to be at work again. He said he must keep this from his wife, who
seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned
to the hotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer.
They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf
they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March
would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, and
he was afterwards glad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up
behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition
which the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeated
agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much,
and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had
plundered them of.

"Now I see," said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, "how
fortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe we
were the instruments of justice."

"Do you suppose th