were opened. Richter took him across the Rhine. The Rhine was Market
Street, and south of that street was a country of which polite American
society took no cognizance.

Here was an epic movement indeed, for South St. Louis was a great sod
uprooted from the Fatherland and set down in all its vigorous crudity in
the warm black mud of the Mississippi Valley. Here lager beer took the
place of Bourbon, and black bread and sausages of hot rolls and fried
chicken. Here were quaint market houses squatting in the middle of wide
streets; Lutheran churches, square and uncompromising, and bulky Turner
Halls, where German children were taught the German tongue. Here, in a
shady grove of mulberry and locust, two hundred families were spread out
at their ease.

For a while Richter sat in silence, puffing at a meerschaum with a huge
brown bowl. A trick of the mind opened for Stephen one of the histories
in his father's library in Beacon Street, across the pages of which had
flitted the ancestors of this blue-eyed and great-chested Saxon. He saw
them in cathedral forests, with the red hair long upon their bodies. He
saw terrifying battles with the Roman Empire surging back and forth
through the low countries. He saw a lad of twenty at the head of rugged
legions clad in wild skins, sweeping Rome out of Gaul. Back in the dim
ages Richter's fathers must have defended grim Eresburg. And it seemed to
him that in the end the new Republic must profit by this rugged stock,
which had good women for wives and mothers, and for fathers men in whose
blood dwelt a fierce patriotism and contempt for cowardice.

This fancy of ancestry pleased Stephen. He thought of the forefathers of
those whom he knew, who dwelt north of Market Street. Many, though this
generation of the French might know it not, had bled at Calais and at