had better go back to Heidelberg and grow: you are not the Magician."

Yet before that little disaster of my calf period I sighed for the
Rhine: I used its wines more freely than was perhaps good for me, and
when the smoke-colored goblet was empty would declare that if I were a
German I should be proud of the grape-wreathed river too. At Bingen
I once sat up to behold the bold outline of the banks crested with
ruins, which in the morning proved to be a slated roof and chimneys.
And when at Heidelberg I saw the Neckar open upon the broad Rhine
plain like the mouth of a trumpet, I felt inspired, and built
every evening on my table a perfect cathedral of slim, spire-shaped
bottles--sunny pinnacles of Johannisberger.

And now, decoyed to the Rhine by a puerile conspiracy, how could I
best get the small change for my five hours?

[Illustration: STRASBURG CATHEDRAL IN FLAMES.]

Should I sulk like a bear in the parlor of the Maison Rouge until the
departure of the Paris train, or should I explore the city? Some wave
from my fond, foolish past flowed over me and filled me with desire.
I felt that I loved the Rhine and the Rhine cities once more. And where
could I better retie myself to those old pilgrim habits than in this
citadel of heroism, a place sanctied by recent woes, a city proved
by its endurance through a siege which even that of Paris hardly
surpassed? One draught, then, from the epic Rhine! To-morrow, at
Marly, I could laugh over it all with Hohenfels.

The Münster was before me--the highest tower in Europe, if we except
the hideous cast-iron abortion at Rouen. I recollected that in my