glowing vision of the past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house. At the dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner, stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street till they were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them up the steps, or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward. He let them get fairly seated before he started the car, and so lost the fun of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each other for support. The Germans have so little sense of humor that probably no one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon the floor. No one apparently found it droll that the conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no one smiled at their efforts to make him understand where they wished to go, and he did not wink at the other passengers in trying to find out. Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the passenger had taken time to get well away from it. When the Marches got into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond their street, the conductor would not take their fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March's self-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff like a drummajor's, who left his place at the circus door to get their tickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling in their

hearts.

"One ought always to overpay them," March sighed, "and I will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for it. This heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we come out." As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who showed them to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by his remorse. "One ought to do it," he said. "We are of the quality of good geniuses to these poor souls; we are Fortune-in disguise; we are money found in the road. It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than we." His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience between them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus, of all modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire. The house was full from floor to roof when they came in, and every one was intent upon the two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the univer sal language of circus humor, and needed no translation either into German or English. They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic attraction of "Miss Darlings, the american Star," as she was billed in English, but they were in good time for one of those equestrian performances which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and for the pantomimic piece which closed the evening.

This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany. When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the right mood to enjoy the allegory of "the Enchantedmountain's Fantasy; the Mountainepisodes; the Highinteresting Sledges - Courses on the Steep Acclivities; the Amazing Uprush of the thenceplunging Four Trains, which arrive with Lightningsswiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-high Mountain; the Highest Triumph of the Today's Circus-Art; the Sledgejourney in the Wizardmountain, and the Fairy Ballet in the Realm of the Ghostprince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in nevertill-now-seen Splendor of Costume." The

Marches were happy in this allegory, and happier in the ballet, which is every where delightfully innocent, and which here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces of the coryphées to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures. They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment of good-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they would have got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a pang.

They looked for him every where when they came out, but he had vanished, and they were left with a regret which if unavailing was not too poignant. In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers, which they analyzed as the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them. Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together would she have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the truth, to know why she had not met any more. She had read much of the prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman, and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it. But she had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kind had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

XXI.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young German friend who came in to see them at breakfast. He said that Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities chose to indulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyful flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his

release from military service. He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest blessing of heaven. He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to take in search of strength, and he pressed them to say if there were not something that he could do for them.

"Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who could think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was in Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants to look him up everywhere."

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man had apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs. March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but she was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in Königstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade their driver be very slow in taking them through Königstrasse, so that he should by no means miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to revere it more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock, whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, muchforgotten Klopstock dwelt, when he came home to live with a comfortable pension

from the Danish government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about among the neighbors in Königstrasse for some manner of house where Heine might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy would have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the little crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay. To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but he had never heard that he lived in Königstrasse; he never had heard where he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Königstrasse, and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done. They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their timber-laced gables. The façades with their lattices stretching in bands quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in successions of blinking dormers, were more richly medieval than anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They could not have said which delighted them more the houses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the prospectives and the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the

stage, and they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in some romantic drama.

The

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which Hamburg made by her much - trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. sense of this gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards made, and assisted the digestion of some of the toughest statistics. In the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediæval streets through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity, that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger. He could not get into the Senate-Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like the New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; people were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but they were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its clamor. He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first, examples of modern German art. The custodian led him gently about and said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any of them.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

characteristics of the English people are their affection for their sovereign, their unwavering respect for caste and all monarchical institutions, their love of nature, animals, and flowers, their regard for in dividual liberty, the precision with which they choose their words in speaking, and their rock-ribbed conservatism and confidence in whatever is English, which is surely dropping them behind in the commercial competition which has sprung up between them and the Germans, the Americans, and the Japanese. If I add to these the pride and comfort they take in their homes, and their excessive fondness for out-door sports and for water, except as a beverage, it seems to me I have summed up their main traits as they appear to a stranger who studies them long enough to understand them.

out contradiction from any quarter. To begin an analysis of their mental makeup, I have said that they always put their worst foot forward. The best homes in London-those that are most palatial within-have the dullest exteriors, and reach away in blocks of plain, box-shaped, soolgrimed, factory like buildings. Englishmen nearly always make the worst impression when they are adding to their acquaintances, and the kindest of them seem rude when they are addressed by strangers, or when either their rights, their liberties, or their comfort are in the slightest degree encroached upon. They go about doing themselves injustice. This proceeds either from awkwardness, shyness, or confidence in themselves. They leave it to you and me and the whole world to find out for ourselves their vir