The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which
Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous
activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the
turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her
shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness
of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and
seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this
gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards
made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. In
the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the
greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic
glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a
quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States
seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets
through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.
It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity,
that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful
new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but
it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public
edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger.
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