Emmeline had childlike lapses; she rejoiced greatly, for instance, at seeing a Strasbourg stork. She confessed, when she saw it, to having read Hans Andersen when she was a little girl, and was happy in the resemblance of the tall chimneys he stood on, and the high-pitched red roofs he surveyed, to the pictures she remembered. But, for that matter, so were we all. We had an hour and a half at Strasbourg, and we drove, of course, to the Cathedral; but it was the stork that we saw, and that each of us privately considered the really valuable impression. He stood beside his nest with his chin sunk in his neck, looking immensely lucky and wise, and one quite agreed with Emmeline that it must be lovely to live under him.

We lunched at the station, and, as the meal progressed, saw again how widespread and sincere is the German sentiment to which I alluded, perhaps too lightly, in the last chapter. Our waitresses were all that could be desired, until there came between us and them a youth from parts without. He was sallow, and the waitresses were buxom; he might have been a student of law or medicine, they were naturally of much lower degree. But they frankly forsook us and sat down beside him in terms of devotion and an open aspect of radiant happiness. When one went to draw his lager beer he put an unrepelled arm round the waist of the other, and when the first came back he chucked her under the chin with undisguised affection, the while we looked on and starved, none knowing the language except Isabel, who thought of nothing but blushing. As Mr. Malt said, if the young man could only have made up his mind, we might have been able to get along with the rejected one; but, apparently, he was not in the least embarrassed by numbers, sending a large and beguiling smile to yet a further hand-maiden, who passed enviously through the speise-salle with a basin of soup. It was only when Dicky stalked across to the old woman who sold sausages and biscuits behind a counter, and pointed indignantly to the person who held all the available table service of the Strasbourg railway station on his knees, that we obtained redress. The old woman laughed as if it were amusing, and called the maidens shrilly; but even then they came with reluctance, as if we had been mere schnapps instead of ten complete luncheons, one soup, and a bread and cheese, as Dicky said. The bread and cheese was the Count, and one gathered from it that the improvement in his immediate prospects was not yet assured, that the arrangimento was still in futuro.

We had become such a large party, that it is impossible to relate the whole of our experiences even in the half hour during which we dawdled round the Strasbourg waiting-room until the train should start. I know it was then, for instance, that Mrs. Portheris took Dicky aside and told him how deeply she sympathised with him in his trying position, and bade him only be faithful to the dictates of his own heart and all would come right in time. I know Dicky promised faithfully to do so, but I must not dwell upon it. Nor is the opportunity adequate to express the indignation we all felt, and not Mr. Mafferton merely, at the insufficient personal impression we made upon the German railway officials. They were so completely preoccupied with their magnificent selves and their vast business that they were unable even to look at us when we asked them questions, and their sole conception of a reply was an order, in terms that sounded brutal to a degree. They were objectionably burly and red in the face; they wore an offensive number of buttons and straps upon their uniforms. As Mr. Mafferton said, they utterly misconceived their position in life, attempting to Kaiser the travelling public by Divine right instead of recognising themselves as humble servants, buttoned only to be made more agreeable to the eye.

One such person trampled upon us to such an extent that I have never been able to satisfy myself that the Senator was sincere in making his little mistake. We were sitting in dejected rows, with a number of other foreigners who had been similarly reduced, when this official entered the waiting-room, advanced to the middle of it, posed with great majesty, and emitted several bars of a kind of chant or chime. It was delivered with too much vigour, and it stopped too abruptly, to be entirely enjoyable; but there was no doubt about the musical intention. It was not even intoning; it was singing, beginning with moderation, going on stronger with indignation, and ending suddenly in a crescendo of denunciation.

We smiled in difficult self-restraint as he went away, and Dicky remarked that he supposed we were in their hands, we couldn\'t object to anything they did to us. In five minutes he came back to exactly the same spot and sang again the same words, in the same key, with the same unction. "Encore!" exclaimed Mr. Malt boldly, but cowered under the glare that was turned upon him, and utterly fell away when we reminded him of the punishments attached in Germany to the charge of lèse majesté. Precisely five minutes more passed away, and Bawlinbuttons, as Miss Callis called him, entered again. Then occurred the Senator\'s little mistake. In the midst of the second bar, the indignant one, Bawlinbuttons stopped short, petrified by poppa, who had advanced and was holding out copper coins whose usefulness we had left behind us, to the value of about fifteen cents.

"Here\'s the collection," said poppa benevolently—for an instant or two he was quite audible—"but unless you know some other tune the company wish me to say that they won\'t trouble you any further."

There are misunderstandings that are never rectified, sometimes because a train draws up at the platform as in this case, and sometimes for other reasons, and it was natural enough that poppa should fail to comprehend Bawlinbuttons\' indignant shouts to the effect that a Kaiser should never be mistaken for an organ-grinder, merely because his tastes are musical. Neither is it likely that the various Teutons who were waiting for the information will ever understand why the announcement that the train for Saarburg, Nancy, Frankfort, and Mayence would leave at ten o\'clock precisely was never completed for the third............