“You did, my dear,” he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it, because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could not bear its expression.  “And so did I; and we were both young a long time.  Travelling brings the past back, don’t you think?  There at that restaurant, where we stopped for dinner—­”

“Yes, it was charming!  Just as it used to be!  With that white cloth, and those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was so nice!  I’m never going home; you may, if you like.”

“You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European.”

“I had to do that.  But I knew better; they don’t begin to be.”

“Perhaps not; but I’ve been thinking that travel is a good deal alike everywhere.  It’s the expression of the common civilization of the world.  When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found that it didn’t start for fifteen minutes, I wasn’t sure whether I was at home or abroad.  And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this train which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I didn’t know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot.  To be sure, Wallenstein wasn’t assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at Eger, and so that came to the same thing.  It’s these confounded fifty-odd years.  I used to recollect everything.”

He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia.  All the morning and early afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow fields between black spaces of forest.  After they left Eger, there was something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a mountain quality in the thin pure air.  The railroad stations were shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the scenery and the people.  Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets.  Along the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by.  At an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him.  He sat down feeling less like a good genius than a