The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantly that he was worth waiting for.  He was as vainglorious of the palace as any grand-monarching margrave of them all.  He could not have been more personally superb in showing their different effigies if they had been his own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a single splendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like rooms he led them through.  The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so poignantly interesting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she perished of her pleasure, one of the things she saw.  She had for once a surfeit of highhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and canopies, the tapestries, the historical associations with the margraves and their marriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon.  The Great Napoleon’s man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters when he occupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his arrangements for taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over to Bavaria, with whom it still 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’.”