his smile that was like a sneer, through all the events
of the voyage; and took March's mind off the scenery with a sudden wrench
when he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance. At
the table d'hote, which was served when the landscape began to be less
interesting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across the
table to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout the
different courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt the
young man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for the
semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that he was a
Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at last
cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their former
Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantled
the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps. The
scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there were
certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than they
remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem was
more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, though
there were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed as
good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of them had been
restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into
trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere
gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the
broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American
dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more,
does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on
the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which
might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still you
know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the
Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.
Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be
storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really
got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure."

"Well, we have got no denkmal, either," said his wife, meaning the
national