His wife used to laugh at him for his Heine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and she, even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage.  He thought long thoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way, with an ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his youth, all ghosts together in the silvered shadow.  The trees shuddered in the night breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, sentimentalizing,” he answered boldly.

“Well, you will be sick,” she said, and he crept back into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement.  But he woke early, as an elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wife still sleeping.  He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the town as he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity for Heine’s birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with his waiter at breakfast.  After all, was not it more important to know something of the actual life of a simple common class of men than to indulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount of associations could feed again to its former bloom?  The waiter said he was a Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served a year for nothing.  Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he got a pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as the one mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid the hotel two marks a day.  March confided to him his secret trouble as to tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a just tip was.

He went to his banker’s, and when he came back he found his wife with her breakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine’s birthplace that she heard with indifference of his failure to get any letters.  It was too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed him her plan, which she had been working out ever since she woke.  It contained every place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined not one should escape them.  She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusing him of having taken cold when he got up in the night, and acquitting him with difficulty.  She herself was perfectly well, but a little fagged, and they must have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way from his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the outside before they entered it.  It is a simple street, and not the cleanest of the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty.  Below the houses are shops, and the first story of Heine’s house is a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where the Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker displayed their signs.