remains.  Twice the Great Frederick had sojourned in the palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the Wild Margrave, and more than once it had welcomed her next neighbor and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercingly plaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the air.  Here, oddly enough, the spell of the Wild Margrave weakened in the presence of his portrait, which signally failed to justify his fame of furious tyrant.  That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular and historical conception of him than the impression he made upon his exalted contemporaries.  The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could so far excuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say:  “The Margrave of Ansbach . . . was a young prince who had been very badly educated.  He continually ill-treated my sister; they led the life of cat and dog.  My sister, it is true, was sometimes in fault . . . .  Her education had been very bad. . .  She was married at fourteen.”

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he would easily have known them for Americans by the handsome fee they gave him; they came away flown with his praise; and their national vanity was again flattered when they got out into the principal square of Ansbach.  There, in a bookseller’s window, they found among the pamphlets teaching different languages without a master, one devoted to the Amerikanische Sprache as distinguished from the Englische Sprache.  That there could be no mistake, the cover was printed with colors in a German ideal of the star-spangled banner; and March said he always knew that we had a language of our own, and that now he was going in to buy that pamphlet and find out what it was like.  He asked the young shop-woman how it differed from English, which she spoke fairly well from having lived eight years in Chicago.  She said that it differed from the English mainly in emphasis and pronunciation.  “For instance, the English say ‘half past’, and the Americans ‘Half past’; the English say ‘laht’ and the Americans say ’late’.”

The weather had now been clear quite long enough, and it was raining again, a fine, bitter, piercing drizzle.  They asked the girl if it always rained in Ansbach; and she owned that it nearly always did.  She said that sometimes she longed for a little American summer; that it was never quite warm in Ansbach; and when they had got out into the rain, March said:  “It was very nice to stumble on Chicago in an Ansbach book-store.  You ought to have told her you had a married daughter in Chicago.  Don’t miss another such chance.”

“We shall need another bag if we keep on buying books at this rate,” said his wife with tranquil irrelevance; and not to give him time for protest; she pushed him into a shop where the valises in the window perhaps suggested her thought.  March made haste to forestall her there by saying they were Americans, but the mistress of the shop seemed to have her misgivings, and “Born Americans, perhaps?” she ventured.  She had probably never met any but the naturalized sort, and supposed these were the only sort.  March re-assured her, and then she said she had a son living in Jersey City, and she made March take his address that he might tell him he had seen his mother; she had apparently no conception what a great way Jersey City is from New York.