Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of
it a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any
more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century. But it
drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play,
and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.
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.
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