March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went to
bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.
He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in
Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal
joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his
window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of
pathos in the line:
"Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!"
and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of
youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places,
with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen
silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he
remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.
He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke
early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though young,
were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves
kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw the street
filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some
in uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps, loosely
straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make
out.
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