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 broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more, does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

     ‘Solo sitting by the shores of old romance’

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded.  “Still, still you know,” March argued, “this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.  Besides, the Rhine doesn’t set up to be sublime; it only means to be storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it.  And then we have really got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure.”

“Well, we have got no denkmal, either,” said his wife, meaning the national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had just passed, “and that is something in our favor.”