l sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries, currants,
grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all harmoniously
contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where no one of the
seasons can very well know itself from the others. It had not been
raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that the
shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of the paths
were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in Germany,
between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was
sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London.
Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of
Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described
Burnamy's beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had
been a woman, could not have failed to remember him. But he failed, with
a real grief, apparently, and certainly a real politeness, to recall
either his name or his person. The landlord was an intelligent,
good-looking young fellow; he told them that he was lately married, and
they liked him so much that they were sorry to see him afterwards
privately boxing the ears of the piccolo, the waiter's little understudy.
Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not have witnessed
his punishment; his being in a dress-coat seemed to make it also an
indignity.

In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the old Orangery of the
Schloss for a cup of tea, and found themselves in the company of several
Ansbach ladies who had brought their work, in the evident habit of coming
there every afternoon for their coffee and for a dish of gossip. They
were kind, uncomely, motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed her hair
at the table; and they all sat outside of the cafe with their feet on the
borders of the puddles which had not dried up there in the shade of the
building.

A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows of trees,
stretched before them with the sunset light on it, and it was all very
quiet and friendly. The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from some
herb apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked like willow
leaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove in each cup, and they sat
contentedly over it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladies were,
talking about. These had recognized the strangers f