Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridge spanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way to the market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St. Gumpertus.  The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemed to be also a fair, with peasants’ clothes and local pottery for sale, as well as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old women squatting before them.  It was all as picturesque as the markets used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back.  Her laugh reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid.  When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil the soldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the street under their windows.  A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a corseted officer’s, from time to time came out of the house across the way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there.  Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and disappeared with them in-doors.  Once she paused from her work to joke with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.

“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. March.  “I think it’s good exercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fat fellows at the window.  I suppose she’ll saw the wood in the cellar, and then lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves’ dressing-rooms.”

“Don’t laugh!  It’s too disgraceful.”

“Well, I don’t know!  If you like, I’ll offer these gentlemen across the way your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller.”

“I wish you’d offer my opinion of them.  They’ve been staring in here with an opera-glass.”

“Ah, that’s a different affair.  There isn’t much going on in Ansbach, and they have to make the most of it.”

The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set at right angles with them, and nothing which went on in the streets was lost.  Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare moments they lay full of sun.  At such times the Marches were puzzled by the sight of citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they had forgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the brief respites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to dry them; and some other sights remained baffling to the last.  Once a man