with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidly after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows; but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew.  Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station:  a young man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking old woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting question whether she was the young man’s servant in her best clothes, or merely his mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression of the courtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church.  In the little ex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborly interest in the curiosity of strangers which endears Italian witness.  The white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying “Gleich!” instead of “Subito!” The architecture of the houses was a party to the illusion.  St. Johannis, like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sort of Teutonized renaissance.

The rococo margraves and margravines used of course to worship in St. Johannis Church.  Now they all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in the crypt of the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble, with draperies of black samite, more and more funereally vainglorious to the last.  Their courtly coffins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with the little coffins of the children that died before they came to the knowledge of their greatness.  On one of these a kneeling figurine in bronze holds up the effigy of the child within; on another the epitaph plays tenderly with the fate of a little princess, who died in her first year.

     In the Rose-month was this sweet Rose taken. 
     For the Rose-kind hath she earth forsaken. 
     The Princess is the Rose, that here no longer blows. 
     From the stem by death’s hand rudely shaken. 
     Then rest in the Rose-house. 
     Little Princess-Rosebud dear! 
     There life’s Rose shall bloom again
     In Heaven’s sunshine clear.

While March struggled to get this into English words, two German ladies, who had made themselves of his party, passed reverently away and left him to pay the sacristan alone.

“That is all right,” he said, when he came out.  “I think we got the most value; and they didn’t look as if they could afford it so well; though you never can tell, here.  These ladies may be the highest kind of highhotes practising a praiseworthy economy.  I hope the lesson won’t be lost on us.  They have saved enough by us for their coffee at the Orangery.  Let us go and have a little willow-leaf tea!”