themselves. Everybody seemed to have gone to bed, but at a certain
corner a girl opened a window above them, and looked out at the moon.

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalled garden facing
it, full of black depths of foliage. In the night March woke and saw the
moon standing over the garden, and silvering its leafy tops. This was
really as it should be in the town where the idolized poet of his youth
was born; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and who had once
seemed like a living friend; who had been witness of his first love, and
had helped him to speak it. His wife used to laugh at him for his
Heine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and she,
even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage. He thought long
thoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way, with
an ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his youth,
all ghosts together in the silvered shadow. The trees shuddered in the
night breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, sentimentalizing," he answered boldly.

"Well, you will be sick," she said, and he crept back into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement. But he woke early, as
an elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wife
still sleeping. He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the town
as he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity for
Heine's birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with his
waiter at breakfast. After all, was not it more important to know
something of the actual life of a simple common class of men than to
indulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount of
associations could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter said he was
a Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served a
year for nothing. Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he got
a pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as the
one mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid the
hotel two marks a day. March confided to him his secret trouble as to
tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a just tip
was.

He went to his banker's, and when he came back he found his wife with her
breakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine's birthplace
that s