and bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.  The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing.  This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself Little Paris.  The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers.  It was rather more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the rain forgot itself.  The place was better shaded than need be in that sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others.  It had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France.  These monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be.  It is not for the victories of a people that any other people can care.  The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them, till time has softened it to a memory

  “Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
   And battles long ago.”

It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of 1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore years before.  Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for the sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern character of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal function; and March was more