“Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!”

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of youth parted and departed.  Who were they, and in what different places, with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen silent for evermore?  It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke early to other voices under his window.  But now the voices, though young, were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves kept time with their singing.  He drew his curtain and saw the street filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some in uniform and some in civil dress with students’ caps, loosely straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make out.  At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said that these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres, and who were now going home.  He promised March a translation of the song, but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-going remained the more poetic with him because its utterance remained inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering about the little city alone.  His wife said she was tired and would sit by the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in.  He went to the cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people of Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout.  They proved it by preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive offerings.  A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and ragged.  Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red guide-books, and studied the objects of interest.  A resplendent beadle in a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver.  At the high altar a priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle’s, or whether somewhere in it he felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river, which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges.  The rough river looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making.  The summer of life as well as the summer of that year was past.  Better return to his own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any one.  A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really a wish to be at work again.  He said he must keep this from his wife, who seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned to the hotel.