After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not so
incomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served them
in a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the
time when it was a patrician mansion. The garden had roses in it and
several sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries, currants,
grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all harmoniously
contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where no one of the
seasons can very well know itself from the others. It had not been
raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that the
shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of the paths
were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in Germany,
between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.
The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was
sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London.
Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of
Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described
Burnamy's beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had
been a woman, could not have failed to remember him.
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