"No matter if it is beer. Find some sketch of the history, and we'll try
to get away from the Stollers in it. I pitied those wild girls, too. What
crazy images of the world must fill their empty minds! How their ignorant
thoughts must go whirling out into the unknown! I don't envy their
father. Do hurry back! I shall be thinking about them every instant till
you come."

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothing to sit looking
through the long twilight at the lovely landscape that the sort of bruise
given by their encounter with the Stollers had left her consciousness
before March returned. She made him admire first the convent church on a
hill further up the river which exactly balanced the fortress in front of
them, and then she seized upon the little books he had brought, and set
him to exploring the labyrinths of their German, with a mounting
exultation in his discoveries. There was a general guide to the city, and
a special guide, with plans and personal details of the approaching
manoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them; and there was a
sketch of the local history: a kind of thing that the Germans know how to
write particularly, well, with little gleams of pleasant humor blinking
through it. For the study of this, Mrs. March realized, more and more
passionately, that they were in the very most central and convenient
point, for the history of Wurzburg might be said to have begun with her
prince-bishops, whose rule had begun in the twelfth century, and who had
built, on a forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg on that
vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn. There had of course been
history before that, but 'nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell,
nothing that so united the glory of this world and the next as that of
the prince-bishops. They had made the Marienburg their home, and kept it
against foreign and domestic foes for five hundred years. Shut within its