as English; and was
he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or
was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?
He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of the
boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offer
him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually lifted a
shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and that
he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the young
man's eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he felt
that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again.
March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin to
eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the baskets
they had brought with them, or from the boat's provision. But he
prevailed, with 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
broke