Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy beyond the sober wont of the fatherland.  The conductor took a special interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.  From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low.  He generalized from the guide’s content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man’s clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex.  He was able to note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted.  Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved.  The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery.  He bemoaned himself after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise.  “It is a life of excitements, but not of movements,” he explained to March; and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too.  “For sugar?” he asked, as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, “No; liver.”

“Ah!” said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in America.  Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all the way to Carlsbad.  A fatherly ‘traeger’ had done his best to get them the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together.  Their compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March had got a window open it did not matter, really.