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 dismounting 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 drum-major’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.  That 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 ins and every one was intent upon the two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either 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 time for one of those equestrian performances which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the pantomimic piece which closed the evening.