ern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed each
other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while the
summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted.
They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over their
breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interest
in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel. They were
fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and they
were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire. Many of
them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls running
before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processions
have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxiety
a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before
the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to
the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the
morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet.
What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an old
town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town,
handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets,
apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course
Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing
absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive
characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight. Some
sort of monument to the national victory over France there must have
been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record
of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware of gardened
squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic
edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the state
builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal
corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to the
Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at their
public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the most
plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay their
devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house they
revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were