Tennis has not been blighted by the imperial frown, and is extremely popular in Germany. Hockey, as far as I know, is not played yet; certainly not by women. Cricket and football are played, but not very much. An Englishman teaching at a gymnasium, told me that the authorities discouraged outdoor games, as they were considered waste of time. Gymnastics is the form of athletics really enjoyed and practised by Germans. Every boy, even every girl, begins them at school, and the boy when he leaves school joins a Turnverein. For wherever Germans foregather, and whatever they do, you may be sure they have a Verein, and that the Verein has feasts in winter and Ausfluege in summer. When a man is young and lusty, the delights of the Verein, the Ausflug, the feast, and the walking tour are often combined. You meet a whole gang of pleasure pilgrims ascending the broad path that leads to the restaurant on the top of a German mountain, or you encounter them in the restaurant itself making speeches to the honour and glory of their Verein; and you find that they are the gymnasts or the fire brigade, or the architects or what not of an adjacent town, and that once a year they make an excursion together, beginning with a walk or a journey by rail or by steamer, and culminating in a restaurant where they dine and drink and speechify. Every age, every trade, and every pastime has its Verein and its anniversary rites. I was much amused and puzzled in Berlin one afternoon by a procession that filed slowly past the tram in which I sat, and was preceded and attended by such a rabble of sightseers that the ordinary traffic was stopped for a time. I thought at first it was a demonstration in connection with temperance or teetotalism, because there were so many broad blue ribbons about, and I was surprised, because I know that Germans club together to drink beer and not to abstain from it, and that they are a sober nation. At the head of the procession came a string of boys on bicycles, each boy carrying a banner. Then came four open carriages garlanded with flowers. There was a garland round each wheel, as well as round the horses' necks and the coachmen's hats, and anywhere else where a garland would rest. In each carriage sat four damsels robed in white, and they wore garlands instead of hats. After them walked a large, stout, red-faced man in evening dress, and he carried a staff. After him walked the music, men puffing and blowing into brass instruments, and, like their leader, wearing evening dress and silk hats. They were followed by a procession that seemed as if it would stretch to the moon, a procession of elderly, portly men all wearing evening dress, all wearing broad blue ribbons and embroidered scarves, and all marching with banners bearing various devices. The favourite device was Heil Gambrinus, and when I saw that I knew that the blue ribbons had nothing to do with total abstention. The next banner explained things. It was the Verein of the Schenkwirte of Berlin,—the publicans, in fact, of Berlin having their little holiday.

All through the summer the German nation amuses itself out of doors, and leads an outdoor life to an extent unknown and impossible in our damp climate. A house that has a garden nearly always has a garden room where all meals are served. Sometimes it is a detached summer house, but more often it opens from the house and is really a big verandah with a roof and sides of glass. In country places the inn gardens are used as dining-rooms from morning till night, and you may if you choose have everything you eat and drink brought to you out of doors. Most inns have a skittle alley, for skittles are still played in Germany by all classes. The peasants play it on Sunday afternoons, and the dignified merchant has his skittle club and spends an evening there once a week. The favourite card game of Germany is still Skat, but bridge has been heard of and will probably supersede it in time. Skat is a good game for three players, with a system of scoring that seems intricate till you have played two or three times and got used to it. In Germany it is always die Herren who play these serious games, while the women sit together with their bits of embroidery. At the Ladies' Clubs in Berlin there is some card playing, but these two or three highly modern and emancipated establishments do not call the tune for all Germany. Directly you get away from Berlin you find that men and women herd separately, far more than in England, take their pleasures separately, and have fewer interests in common. It is still the custom for the man of the family to go to a beer-house every day, much as an Englishman goes to his club. Here he meets his friends, sees the papers, talks, smokes, and drinks his Schoppen. Each social grade will have its own haunts in this way, or its own reserved table in a big public room. At the Hof Braeuhaus in Munich one room is set apart for the Ministers of State, and I was told some years ago that the appointments of it were just as plain and rough as those in the immense public hall where anyone who looked respectable could have the best beer in the world and a supper of sorts.

It is dull uphill work to write about sport and outdoor games in Germany, because you may have been in many places and met a fair variety of people without seeing any enthusiasm for either one or the other. The bulk of the nation is, as a matter of fact, not interested in sport or in any outdoor games except indifferent tennis, swimming, skating, and in some places boating. When a German wants to amuse himself, he sits in a garden and listens to a good band; if he is young and energetic, he walks on a well-made road to a restaurant on the top of a hill. In winter he plays skat, goes to the theatre or to a concert, or has his music at home. Also he reads a great deal, and he reads in several tongues. This, at any rate, is the way of Germans in cities and summer places, and it is a very small proportion of the educated classes who lead what we call a country life. "Elizabeth" knows German country life, and describes it in her charming books; perhaps she will some day choose to tell us how the men in her part of the world amuse themselves, and whether they are good sportsmen. I must confess that I have only once seen a German in full sporting costume. It was most impressive, though, a sort of pinkish grey bound everywhere with green, and set off by a soft felt hat and feathers. As we were having a walk with him, and it was early summer, we ventured to ask him what he had come to kill. "Bees," said he, and killed one the next moment with a pop-gun.



CHAPTER XXI

INNS AND RESTAURANTS

English people who have travelled in Germany know some of the big well-kept hotels in the large towns, and know that they are much like big hotels in other continental cities. It is not in these establishments that you can watch national life or discover much about the Germans, except that they are good hotel-keepers; and this you probably discovered long ago abroad or at home. If you are a woman, you may be impressed by the fineness, the whiteness, the profusion, and the embroidered monograms of the linen, whether you are in a huge caravanserai or a wayside inn. Otherwise a hotel at Cologne or Heidelberg has little to distinguish it from a hotel at Brussels or Bale. The dull correct suites of furniture, the two narrow bedsteads, even the table with two tablecloths on it, a thick and a thin, the parqueted floor, and the small carpet are here, there, and everywhere directly you cross the Channel.

The modern German tells you with pride that this apparent want of national quality and colour is to be felt in every corner of life, and that what you take to be German is not peculiarly German at all, but common to the whole continent of Europe. This may be true in certain cases and in a certain sense, but there is another sense in which it is never true. For instance, the women of continental nations wear high-necked gowns in the evening. It is only English women who wear evening gowns as a matter of course every day of their lives. I have been told in Germany that, so far from being a sign of civilisation, this fashion is merely a stupid survival from the times when all the women of Europe went barenecked all day. However this may be, there is no doubt that whether the gown be high or low, worn by sunlight or lamplight, you can see at a glance whether the woman who wears it is English, French, or German. Every nation has its own features, its own manners, and its own tone, instantly recognised by foreigners, and apparently hidden from itself. The German assures you that the English manner is quite unmistakable, and he will even describe and imitate for your amusement some of his silly countryfolk who were talking to him quite naturally, but suddenly froze and stiffened at the approach of English friends whose national manner they wished to assume. In England we are not conscious of having a stiff frozen manner, and we never dream that everyone has the same manner. It takes a foreigner to perceive this; and so in Germany it takes a foreigner to appreciate and even to see the characteristic trifles that give a nation a complexion of its own.

Some of the most comfortable hotels in Germany are the smaller ones supported entirely by Germans. A stray Englishman, finding one of these starred in Baedeker and put in the second class, may try it from motives of economy, but in many of them he would only meet merchants on their travels and the unmarried men of the neighbourhood who dine there. In such establishments as these the table d'hote still more or less prevails, while if you go to fashionable hotels you dine at small tables nowadays and see nothing of your neighbours. The part played during dinner by the hotel proprietor varies considerably. In a big establishment he is represented by the Oberkellner, and does not appear at all. The Oberkellner is a person of weight and standing; so much so that when you are in a crowded beer garden and can get no one to attend to you, you call out Ober to the first boy waiter who passes, and he is so touched by the compliment that he serves you before your turn. But in a real old-fashioned German inn you have personal relations with the proprietor, for he takes the head of his table and attends to the comfort of his customers as carefully as if they were his guests. This used to be a universal custom, but you only find it observed now in the Sleepy Hollows of Germany. I have stayed in a most comfortable and well-managed hotel where the proprietor and his brother waited on their guests all through dinner, but never sat down with them. There were hired men, but they played a subordinate part. In small country inns the host still arrives in the garden when your meal is served, asks if you have all you want, wishes you guten Appetit, and after a little further conversation waddles away to perform the same office at some other table. Except in the depths of the country where the inn-keepers are peasants, a German hotel-keeper invariably speaks several languages, and has usually been in Paris and London or New York. His business is to deal with the guests and the waiters, and to look after the cellar and the cigars; while his wife or his sister, though she keeps more in the background than a French proprietress, does just as much work as a Frenchwoman, and, as far as one can judge, more than any man in the establishment. She superintends the chambermaids and has entire care of the vast stock of linen; in many cases she has most of it washed on the premises, and she helps to iron and repair it. She buys the provisions, and sees that there is neither waste nor disorder in the kitchen; she often does a great part of the actual cooking herself. When I was a girl I happened to spend a winter in a South German hotel of old standing, kept for several generations in the same family, and now managed by two brothers and a sister. The sister, a well-educated young woman of twenty-five, used to get up at five winter and summer to buy what was wanted for the market, and one day she took me with her. It was a pretty lesson in the art of housekeeping as it is understood and practised in Germany. All the peasant women in the duchy could not have persuaded my young woman to have given the fraction of a farthing more for her vegetables than they were worth that day, or to take any geese except the youngest and plumpest. She went briskly from one part of the market to the other, seeming to see at a glance where it was profitable to deal this morning. She did not haggle or squabble as inferior housewives will, because she knew just what she wanted and what it was prudent to pay for it. When she got home she sat down to a second breakfast that seemed to me like a dinner, a stew of venison and half a bottle of light wine; but, as she said, hotel keeping is exhausting work, and hotel-keepers must needs live well.

At some hotels in this part of Germany wine is included in the charge for dinner, and given to each guest in a glass carafe or uncorked bottle. It is kept on tap even in the small wayside inns, where you get half a litre for two or three pence when you are out for a walk and are thirsty. If you dislike thin sour wine you had better avoid the grape-growing lands and travel in Bavaria, where every country inn-keeper brews his own beer. Many of these small inns entertain summer visitors, not English and Americans who want luxuries, but their own countryfolk, whose purses and requirements are both small. As far as I know by personal experience and by hearsay, the rooms in these inns are always clean. The bedding all over Germany is most scrupulously kept and aired. In country places you see the mattresses and feather beds hanging out of the windows near the pots of carnations every sunny day. The floors are painted, and are washed all over every morning. The curtains are spotless. In each room there is the inevitable sofa with the table in front of it, a most sensible and comfortable addition to a bedroom, enabling you to seek peace and privacy when you will. If you wander far enough from the beaten track, you may still find that all the water you are supposed to want is contained in a good-sized glass bottle; but if you are English your curious habits will be known, and more water will be brought to you in a can or pail. My husband and I once spent a summer in a Thuringian inn that had never taken staying guests before, and even here we found that the proprietress had heard of English ways, and was willing, with a smile of benevolent amusement, to fill a travelling bath every day. This inn had a summer house where all our meals were served as a matter of course, and where people from a fashionable watering-place in the next valley came for coffee or beer sometimes. The household itself consisted of the proprietress, her daughter, and her maidservant, and during the four months we spent there I never knew them to sit down to a regular meal. They ate anything at any time, as they fancied it. The summer house in which we had our meals was large and pleasant, with a wide view of the hills and a near one of an old stone bridge and a trout stream. The trees near the inn were limes, and their scent while they were in flower overpowered the scent of pines coming at other times with strength and fragrance from the surrounding forest. The only drawback to our comfort was a hornets' nest in an old apple-tree close to the summer-house. The hornets used to buzz round us at every meal, and at first we supposed they might sting us. This they never did, though we waged war on them fiercely. But no one wants to be chasing and killing hornets all through breakfast and dinner, so we asked the maid of the inn what could be done to get rid of them. She smiled and said Jawohl, which was what she always said; and we went out for a walk. When we came back and sat down to supper there were no hornets. Jawohl had just stood on a chair, she said, poured a can of water into the nest, and stuffed up the opening with grass. She had not been stung, and we were not pestered by a hornet again that summer. I have sometimes told this story to English people, and seen that though they were too polite to say so they did not believe it. But that is their fault. The story as I have told it is true. We found immense numbers of hornets in one wild uninhabited valley where we sometimes walked that summer, but we were never stung.

The proprietress of this inn, like most German women, was a fair cook. Besides the inn she owned a small brewery, and employed a brewer who lived quite near, and showed us the whole process by which he transferred the water of the trout stream into foaming beer. His mistress had no rival in the village, and the village was a small one, so sometimes the beer was a little flat. When Jawohl brought a jug from a cask just broached, she put it on the table with a proud air, and informed us that it was frisch angesteckt. We once spent a summer in a Bavarian village where a dozen inns brewed their own beer, and it was always known which one had just tapped a cask. Then everyone crowded there as a matter of course. In all these country inns there is one room with rough wooden tables and benches, and here the peasants sit smoking their long pipes and emptying their big mugs or glasses, and as a rule hardly speaking. They do not get drunk, but no doubt they spend more than they can afford out of their scanty earnings.

In the Bavarian village the inns were filled all through the summer with people from Nuremberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Erfurth, and other Bavarian towns. The inn-keeper used to charge five shillings a week for a scrupulously clean, comfortably furnished room, breakfast was sixpence, dinner one and two-pence, and supper as you ordered it. For dinner they gave you good soup, Rindfleisch, either poultry or roast meat, and one of the Mehlspeisen for which Bavaria is celebrated, some dish, that is, made with eggs and flour. There was a great variety of them, but I only remember one clearly, because I was impressed by its disreputable name. It was some sort of small pancake soaked in a wine sauce, and it was called versoffene Jungfern. Most of these inns kept no servants, and except in the Kurhaus there was not a black-coated waiter in the place. Our inn-keeper tilled his own fields, grew his own hops, and brewed his own beer; and his wife, wearing her peasant's costume, did all the cooking and cleaning, assisted by a daughter or a cousin. When you met her out of doors she would be carrying one of the immense loads peasant women do carry up hill and down dale in Germany. She was hale and hearty in her middle age, and always cheerful and obliging. At that inn, too, we never had a meal indoors from May till October. Everything was brought out to a summer-house, from which we looked straight down the village, its irregular Noah's Ark-like houses, and its background of mountains and forest.

When you first get back to England from Germany, you have to pull yourself together and remember that in your own country, even on a hot still summer evening, you cannot sit in a garden where a band is playing and have your dinner in the open air, unless you happen to be within reach of Earl's Court. In German towns there are always numbers of restaurants in which, according to the weather, meals can be served indoors or out. You see what use people make of them if, for instance, you happen to be in Hamburg on a hot summer night. All round the basin of the Alster there are houses, hotels, and gardens, and every public garden is so crowded that you wonder the waiters can pass to and fro. Bands are playing, lights are flashing, the little sailing boats are flitting about. The whole city after its day's work has turned out for air and music and to talk with friends. And as you watch the scene you know that in every city, even in every village of the empire, there is some such gala going on: in gardens going down to the Rhine from the old Rhenish towns; in the gardens of ancient castles set high above the stifling air of valleys; in the forest that comes to the very edge of so many little German towns; even in the streets of towns where a table set on the pavement will be pleasanter than in a room on such a night as this. You can sit at one of these restaurants and order nothing but a cup of coffee or a glass of beer; or you can dine, for the most part, well and cheaply. If you order a halbe Portion of any dish, as Germans do, you will be served with more than you can eat of it. The variety offered by some of the restaurants in the big cities, the excellence of the cooking, the civilisation of the appointments, and the service, all show that the German must be the most industrious creature in the world, and the thriftiest and one of the cleverest. In London we have luxurious restaurants for people who can spend a great deal of money, but in Berlin they have them for people who cannot spend much. That is the difference between the two cities. How Berlin does it is a mystery. In the restaurants I have seen there is neither noise nor bustle nor garish colours nor rough service nor any other of the miseries we find in our own cheap eating-houses. In one of them the walls were done in some kind of plain fumed wood with a frieze and ceiling of soft dull gold. In another each room had a different scheme of colour.

"So according to your Stimmung you will choose your room," said the friends who took me. "To-night we are rather cheerful. We will go to the big room on the first floor. That is all pale green and ivory."

"You have nothing like this in England," said the artist as we went up the lift. "It is terrible in England. When I asked for my lunch at three or four o'clock I was told that lunch was over. Das hat keinen Zweck,—I want my lunch when I am hungry."

"But you are terribly behindhand in some ways in Berlin," I said, for I knew the artist liked an argument. "In London you can shop all through the night by telephone. It is most convenient."

"Have you ever done it?"

"I'm not on the telephone, and I am generally asleep at night. But other people...."

"Verrueckt," said the artist. "Who in his senses wants to do shopping at night? Now look at this room, and admit that you have nothing at all like it."

The first swift impression of the place was that Liberty had brought his stuffs, his furniture, and his glass from London and set up as a restaurateur in Berlin. The whole thing was certainly well done. It was not as florid and fussy as our expensive restaurants. The colours were quiet, and the necessary draperies plain. The glass was thin and elegant; so were the coffee cups; and the table linen was white and fine. Nothing about it, however, would be worth describing if it had been expensive. But the menu, which covered four closely printed pages, showed that the most expensive dish offered there cost one and threepence, while the greater number cost ninepence, sixpence, or threepence each. The hungry man would begin with crayfish, which were offered to him prepared in ten various ways; for the Germans, like the French, are extremely fond of crayfish. He would have them in soup, for instance, or with asparagus, with salad or dressed with dill. Then he would find the week's bill of fare on his card, three or four dishes for each day, some cooked in small casseroles and served so to any guest who orders one. If it was a Friday he could have a ragout of chicken in the Bremen style, or a slice from a Hamburg leg of mutton with cream sauce and celery salad, or ox-tongue cooked with young turnips. If he was a Catholic he would find two kinds of fish ready for him,—trout, cooked blue, and a ragout of crayfish with asparagus and baked perch. But these are just the special dishes of the day, and he is not bound to try them. There are seven kinds of soup, including real turtle, and it is not for me to say how real turtle can be supplied in Berlin for 30 pfennig. There are seven kinds of fish and too many varieties of meat, poultry, salads, vegetables and sweets, both hot and cold, to count. A man can have any kind of cooking he fancies, too; his steak may be German, Austrian, or French; he can have English roast beef, Russian caviare, a Maltese rice pudding, apples from the Tyrol, wild strawberries from a German forest, all the cheeses of France and England, a Welsh rarebit, and English celery. The English celery is as mysterious as the real turtle, for it was offered in June. Pheasants and partridges, I can honestly say, however, were not offered. Under the head of game there were only venison, geese, chickens, and pigeons.

I am sorry now that when I dined at this restaurant I did not order real turtle soup, Roast beef Engl. mit Schmorkartoffeln, celery, and a Welsh rarebit, because then I should have discovered whether these old British friends were recognisable in their Berlin environment. But it was more amusing at the time to ask for ham cooked in champagne and served with radish sauce, and other curious inviting combinations.

"But at home," I said to the artist,—"at home we just eat to live. We have a great contempt for people who pay much attention to food."

"I stayed in an English house last year, and never did I hear so much about food," said he. "One would eat nothing but grape-nuts and cheese, and another swore by toast and hot water and little Pastetchen of beef, and the third would have large rice puddings, and the fourth asked for fruit at every meal, and the fifth said all the others were wrong and that he wanted a good dinner. The poor hostess would have been distracted if she had not been one of those who love a new fad and try each one in turn. Also there were two eminent physicians in the house, and one of these drank champagne every night, while the other would touch nothing but Perrier and said champagne was poison. Directly we sat down we discussed these things, ... and everyone assured me that if I tried his regime I should improve in health most marvellously."

"Which did you try?" I asked.

"The good dinner and the champagne, of course. But I did not find they affected my health one way or the other."



CHAPTER XXII

LIFE IN LODGINGS

As rents are high in Germany, it is usual for people of small means to let off one or two rooms, either furnished or unfurnished. But it is not usual to supply a lodger with any meal except his coffee and rolls in the morning. If you wish to take lodgings in a German town, and work through the long list of them in a local paper, you will probably find no one willing to provide for you in the English fashion.

"Cooking!" they say with horror,—"cooking! You want to eat in your room. No. That can we not undertake. Coffee in the morning, yes; and rolls with it and butter and even two eggs, but nothing further. Just round the corner in the Koenigstrasse are two very fine restaurants, where the Herrschaften can eat what they will at any hour of the day, and for moderate prices."

If you insist, the most they will promise, and that not willingly, is to provide you with a knife and fork and a tablecloth for a pyramid of courses sent hot from one of the very fine adjacent restaurants for 1 mark or 1 mark 20 pf. Supper in Germany is the easiest meal in the day to provide, as you buy the substantial part of it at a Delikatessenhandlung, and find that even a German landlady will condescend to get you rolls and butter and beer. This sounds like the Simple Life, to be sure; but if you are in German lodgings for any length of time you probably desire for one reason or the other to lead it. The plan of having your dinner sent piping hot from a restaurant in nice clean white dishes rather like monster souffle dishes is not a bad one if the restaurant keeps faith with you. It is rather amusing to begin at the top with soup and work through the various surprises and temptations of the pyramid till you get to Biskuit-Pudding mit Vanille Sauce at the bottom. But in nine cases out of ten the restaurant fails you, sends uneatable food, is absurdly unpunctual or says plainly it can't be bothered. Then you have to wander about and out of doors for your food in all weathers and all states of health. This is amusing for a time, but not in the long run. It is astonishing how tired you can get of the "very fine" restaurants within reach, of their waitresses, their furniture, their menus, and their daily guests. At least, this is so in a small town where the best restaurant is not "very fine," although both food and service will be better than in an English town of the same size. If you are in Berlin and can go to the good restaurants, there you will be in danger of becoming a gourmet and losing your natural affection for cold mutton.

In a university or a big commercial town it is easy to get rooms for less than we pay in England; but in a small Residenz I have found it difficult. There were rooms to let, but no one wanted us, because we were not officers with soldier servants to wait on us; nor did we want to engage rooms as the officers did for at least six months. In fact, we found ourselves as unpopular as ladies are in a London suburb where all the lodging-house keepers want "gentlemen in the city" who are away all day and give no trouble. At last, after searching through every likely street in the town, we found a dentist with exuberant manners, who said he would overlook our shortcomings, and allow us to inhabit his rooms at a high price on condition we gave no trouble. We said we never gave trouble anywhere, and left both hotels and lodging-houses with an excellent character, so the bargain was concluded. I saw that his wife was not a party to it, but he overruled her, and as he was a big red-faced noisy man, and she was a small rat of a woman, I thought he would continue to do so. One is always making these stupid elementary mistakes about one's fellow-creatures. But a little later in the day I had occasion to call at the rooms to complete some arrangement about luggage, and then the wife received me alone. I asked her if she could put a small table into a room that only had a big one. I forget why I wanted it.

"Table!" she said rudely. "What can you want another table for? Isn't that one enough?"

"I should like another," I said,—"any little one would do."

"I don't keep tables up my sleeve," said she. "You see what you can have, ... just what is there. If it doesn't suit you...."

"But it does suit me," I said hurriedly, for the search had been long and exhausting, and the rooms were pleasant enough. I thought we need not deal much with the woman.

"No meals except coffee in the morning; you understand that?" she said in a truculent tone.

"Oh yes, I understand. We shall go out at midday and at night. Afternoon tea I always make myself with a spirit lamp...."

Never in my life have I been so startled. I thought the woman was going to behave like a rat in a corner, and fly at me. She shook her fist and shouted so loud that she brought the dentist on the scene.

"Spiritus," she screamed. "Spiritus—Spiritus leid' ich nicht."

"Bless us!" I said in English. "What's the matter?"

"Was ist's?" said the dentist, and he looked downright frightened.

"Sie will kochen," said his wife, shaking her fist at me again. "She has a spirit lamp. She wants to turn my beautiful bestes Zimmer into a kitchen. She will take all the polish off my furniture, just as the last people did when they cooked for themselves."

"Cooked!" I said. "Who speaks of cooking?—I spoke of a cup of tea."

"Spiritus leid' ich nicht," shrieked the woman.

"No," said the dentist, "we can't have cooking here."

"Spiritus leid'...."

But I fled. Luckily, we had not paid any rent in advance. I made up my mind that I would never confess to my small harmless Etna in German lodgings again, and would bolt the door while I boiled water for tea in it. We found rooms after another weary search, but they were extremely noisy and uncomfortable. We had to take them for six weeks, and could only endure them for a fortnight, and though we paid them the full six weeks' rent when we left, they charged us for every jug of hot water we had used, and added a Trinkgeld for the servant.

"We did not engage to pay extra either for hot water or for Trinkgeld," we said, turning, as worms will even in a Residenz, where everyone is a worm who is not Militaer.

"But Englaender never give a Trinkgeld. That is why we have put it in the bill. The girl expects it, and has earned it."

"The girl will have it," we said; "but we shall give it her ourselves. And what have you to say about the hot water?"

"Without coal it is impossible to have hot water. We let you our rooms, but we did not let you our coal. It is quite simple. Have you any other complaint to make?"

We had, but we did not make them. We went to one of the big cities, where the civilian is still a worm, but where he has a large number and variety of other worms to keep him company. In Berlin or Hamburg or Leipzig there are always furnished rooms delighted to receive you. There may be a difficulty, however, if you are a musician. The police come in with their regulations; or your fellow-lodgers may be students of medicine or philosophy, and driven wild by your harmonies. I knew a young musician who always took rooms in the noisiest street in Berlin, and practised with his windows open. He said the din of electric trams, overhead trains, motor cars, and heavy lorries helped his landlady and her family to suffer a Beethoven sonata quite gladly.

One of the insoluble mysteries of German life is the cheapness of furnished lodgings as compared with the high rent and rates. To be sure, the landlady does not cook for you, and the bed-sitting-room is not considered sordid in Germany. In fact, the separate sitting-room is almost unknown, though it is easy to arrange one by shifting some furniture. The pattern of the room and its appointments hardly vary in any part of Germany, though of course the size and quality vary with the price. If you take a small room you have one straight window, and if you take a large one you have several. Or you may have a broad balcony window opening on to a balcony. You have the parqueted or painted floor, the porcelain stove, the sofa, the table, the wooden bedstead, and the wooden hanging cupboard wherever you are. It is always sensible, comfortable furniture, and usually plain. When people over there know no better they buy themselves tawdry horrors, just as they do here. The German manufacturers flood the world with such things. But people who let lodgings put their treasures in a sacred room they call das beste Zimmer, and only use on festive occasions. They fob you off with old-fashioned stuff they do not value, a roomy solid cupboard, a family sofa, a chest of drawers black with age, and a hanging mirror framed in old elm-wood; and if it were not for a bright green rep tablecloth, snuff-coloured curtains, and a wall paper with a brown background and yellow snakes on it, you would like your quarters very well indeed. Rooms are usually let by the month, except in watering-places, where weekly prices prevail. In Leipzig you can get a room for 10s. a month. It will be a parterre or a fourth-floor room, rather gloomy and rather shabby, but a possible room for a student who happens to be hard up. For L1 a month you can get a room on a higher floor, and better furnished, while for L1, 10s. a month in Hamburg I myself have had two well-furnished rooms commanding a fine view of the Alster, and one of them so large that in winter it was nearly impossible to keep warm. Then my Hamburg friends told me I was paying too much, and that they could have got better lodgings for less money. They were nearer the sky than I should like in these days, but the old German system of letting the higher flats in a good house for a low rent benefits people who care about a "select" neighbourhood and yet cannot pay very much. The modern system of lifts will gradually make it impossible to get a flat or lodgings in a good street without paying as much for the fifth floors as for the first.

You do not see much of a German landlady, as she does not cater for you. She is often a widow, and when you know the rent of a flat you wonder how she squeezes a living out of what her lodgers pay her. She cannot even nourish herself with their scraps, or warm herself at a kitchen fire for which they pay. Some of them perform prodigies of thrift, especially when they have children to feed and educate. At the end of a long severe winter, when the Alster had been frozen for months, I found out by chance that my landlady, a sad aged widow with one little boy, had never lighted herself a fire. She let every room of her large flat, except a kitchen and a Kammer opening out of it. The little food she needed she cooked on an oil stove, at night she had a lamp, and of course she never by any chance opened a window. She said she could not afford coals, and that her son and she managed to keep warm. The miracle is that they both kept alive and well. Another German landlady was of a different type, a big buxom bustling creature, who spent most of the day in her husband's coal sheds, helping him with his books and taking orders. Although she was so busy she undertook to cook for me, and kept her promise honourably; and she cooked for herself, her husband, and their work-people. She used sometimes to show me the huge dishes of food they were about to consume, food that was cheap to buy and nourishing to eat, but troublesome to prepare. She did all her own washing too, and dried it in the narrow slip of a room her husband and she used for all purposes. I discovered this by going in to see her when she was ill one day, and finding rows of wet clothes hung on strings right across her bed. I made no comment, for nothing that is an outrage of the first laws of hygiene will surprise you if you have gone here and there in the byways of Germany. An English girl told me that when she was recovering from a slight attack of cholera in a Rhenish Pension, they were quite hurt because she refused stewed cranberries. "Das schadet nichts, das ist gesund," they said. I could hear them say it. Only the summer before a kindly hotel-keeper had brought me a ragout of Schweinefleisch and vanilla ice under similar circumstances. The German constitution seems able to survive anything, even roast goose at night at the age of three.

A Pension in Germany costs from L3 a month upwards. That is to say, you will get offers of a room and full board for this sum, but I must admit that I never tried one at so low a rate, and should not expect it to be comfortable. Rent and food are too dear in the big towns to make a reasonable profit possible on such terms, unless the household is managed on starvation lines. To have a comfortable room and sufficient food, you must pay from L5 to L7 a month, and then if you choose carefully you will be satisfied. The society is usually cosmopolitan in these establishments, and the German spoken is a warning rather than a lesson. It is not really German life that you see in this way, though the proprietress and her assistants may be German. In most of the university towns some private families take "paying guests," and when they are agreeable people this is a pleasanter way of life than any Pension.

Before you have been in Germany a fortnight the police expects to know all about you. You have to give them your father's Christian and surname, and tell them how he earned his living, and where he was born; also your mother's Christian and maiden name, and where she was born. You must declare your religion, and if you are married give your husband's Christian and surname; also where he was born, and what he does for a living. If you happen to do anything yourself, though, you need not mention it. They do not expect a woman to be anything further than married or single. But you must say when and where you were last in Germany, and how often you have been, and why you have come now, and what you are doing, and how long you propose to stay. They tell you in London you do not need a passport in Germany, and they tell you in Berlin that you must either produce one or be handed over for inquiry to your Embassy. Last year when I was there I produced one twenty-three years old. I had not troubled to get a new one, but I came across this, quite yellow with age, and I thought it might serve to make some official happy; for I had once seen my husband get himself, me, and our bicycles over the German frontier and into Switzerland, and next morning back into Germany, by showing the gendarmes on the bridge his C.T.C. ticket. I cannot say that my ancient passport made my official exactly happy. Twenty-three years ago he was certainly in a Steckkissen, and no doubt he felt that in those days, in a world without him to set it right, anything might happen.

"Twenty-three years," he bellowed at the top of his voice, for he saw that I was fremd, and wished to make himself clear. We are not the only people who scream at foreigners that they may understand. "Twenty-three years. But it is a lifetime."

It was for him no doubt. I admitted that twenty-three years was—well, twenty-three years, and explained that I had been told at a Reisebureau that a passport was unnecessary.

"They know nothing in England," he said gloomily. "With us a passport is necessary; but what is a passport twenty-three years old?"

I admitted that, from the official point of view, it was not much, and he made no further difficulties. As a rule you need not go to the police bureau at all. The people you are with will get the necessary papers, and fill them in for you; but I wanted to see whether the German jack-in-office was as bad as his reputation makes him. Germans themselves often complain bitterly of the treatment they receive at the hands of these lower class officials.

"I went to the police station," said a German lady who lived in England, and was in her own country on a visit. "I went to anmelden myself, but not one of the men in the office troubled to look up. When I had stood there till I was tired I said that I wished someone to attend to me. Every pen stopped, every head was raised, astounded by my impertinence. But no one took any notice of my request. I waited a little longer, and then fetched myself a chair that someone had left unoccupied. I did not do it to make a sensation. I was tired. But every pen again stopped, and one in authority asked in a voice like thunder what I made here. I said that I had come to anmelden myself, and he began to ask the usual questions with an air of suspicion that was highly offensive. You can see for yourself that I do not look like an anarchist or anything but what I am, a respectable married woman of middle age. I told the man everything he wanted to know, and at every item he grunted as if he knew it was a lie. In the end he asked me very rudely how long a stay I meant to make in Germany.

"Not a day longer than I can help," I said; "for your manners do not please me."

All the pens stopped again till I left the office, and when I got back to my mother she wept bitterly; for she said that I should be prosecuted for Beamtenbeleidigung and put in prison.

"But the really interesting fact about the system is that it doesn't work," said a German to me; "when I wanted my papers a little while ago I could not get them. Nothing about me could be discovered. Officially I did not exist."

Yet he had inherited a name famous all over the world, was a distinguished scientific man himself, and had been born in the city where his existence was not known to the police.

"Take care you don't go in at an Ausgang or out at an Eingang," said an Englishman who had just come back from Berlin. "Take care you don't try to buy stamps at the Post Office out of your turn. Remember that you can't choose your cab when you arrive. A policeman gives you a number, and you have to hunt amongst a crowd of cabs for that number, even if it is pouring with rain. Remember that the police decides that you must buy your opera tickets on a Sunday morning, and stand queue for hours till you get them. If you have a cold in your head, stay at home. Last winter a man was arrested for sneezing loudly. It was considered Beamtenbeleidigung. The Englishwoman who walked on the grass in the Tiergarten was not arrested, because the official who saw her died of shock at the sight, and could not perform his duty."

Wherever you go in Germany you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can hardly have been visible from the street, but my landlady came to me excitedly and said the police would be on her before the day was out if the jug was left there. The police allowed nothing on a window-sill in that town, lest it should fall on a citizen's head. Each town or district has its own restrictions, its own crimes. In one you will hear that a butcher boy is not allowed on the side-path carrying his tray of meat. If a policeman catches him at it, he, or his employer, is fined. In another town the awning from a shop window must not exceed a certain length, and you are told of a poor widow, who, having just had a new one put up at great expense, was compelled by the police to take the whole thing down, because the flounce was a quarter of an inch longer than the regulations prescribed. You hear of a poor man laboriously building a toy brick wall round the garden in his Hof, and having to pull it to pieces because "building" is not allowed except with police permission. In some towns the length of a woman's gown is decided in the Polizeibureau, and the officers fine any woman whose skirt touches the ground. In one town you may take a dog out without a muzzle; in another it is a crime. A merchant on his way to his office, in a city where there was a muzzling order, found to his annoyance, one morning, that his mother's dog had followed him unmuzzled. He had no string with him, he could not persuade the dog to return, and he could not go back with it, because he had an important appointment. So he risked it and went on. Before long, however, he met a policeman. The usual questions were asked, his name and address were taken, and he was told that he would be fined. Hardly had he got to the end of the street when he met a second policeman. He explained that the matter was settled, but this was not the opinion of the policeman. Was the dog not at large, unmuzzled, on his the policeman's beat? With other policemen he had nothing to do. The dog was his discovery, the name and address of the owner were required, and there was no doubt, in the policeman's mind, that the owner would have to pay a second fine. The merchant went his ways, still followed by an unmuzzled unled dog. Before long he met a third policeman, gave his name and address a third time, and was assured that he would have to pay a third time.

"Dann war es mir zu bunt," said the merchant, and he picked up the dog and carried it the rest of the way to his office. When he got there he sent it home in a cab.



CHAPTER XXIII

SUMMER RESORTS

If you choose to leave the railroad you may still travel by diligence in Germany, and rumble along the roads in its stuffy interior. As you pass through a village the driver blows his horn, old and young run out to enjoy the sensation of the day, the geese cackle and flutter from you in the dust, you catch glimpses of a cobble-stoned market-place, a square church-tower with a stork's nest on its summit, Noah's Ark-like houses with thatched or gabled roofs, tumble-down balconies, and outside staircases of wood. Sometimes when the official coach is crowded you may have an open carriage given you without extra charge, but you cannot expect that to happen often; nor will you often be driven by postillion nowadays. Indeed, for all I know the last one may have vanished and been replaced by a motor bus. You can take one to a mountain inn in the Black Forest nowadays, over a pass I travelled a few years ago in a mail coach. In those times it was a jog-trot journey occupying the long lazy hours of a summer morning. I suppose that now you whizz and hustle through the lovely forest scenery pursued by clouds of dust and offended by the fumes of petrol, but no doubt you get to your destination quicker than you used. The pleasantest way to travel in Germany, if you are young and strong, is on your feet. It is enchanting to walk day after day through the cool scented forest and sleep at night in one of the clean country inns. You must choose your district and your inn, for if you went right off the traveller's track and came to a peasant's house you would find nothing approaching the civilisation of an English farmhouse. But in most of the beautiful country districts of Germany there are fine inns, and there are invariably good roads leading to them. This way of travelling is too tame for English people as a rule. They laugh at the broad well-made path winding up the side of a German mountain, and still more at the hotel or restaurant to be found at the top. From the English point of view a walk of this kind is too tame and easy either for health or pleasure. But the beauty of it, especially in early summer, can never be forgotten; and so it is worth while, even if you are young and cherish a proper scorn for broad roads and good dinners. You would probably come across some dinners that were not good, tough veal, for instance, and greasy vegetables. The roads you would have to accept, and walk them if you choose in tennis shoes. Indeed, you would forget the road and eat the dinner unattending; for all that's made would be a green thought in a green shade for you by the end of the day, and as you shut your eyes at night you would see forest, forest with the sunlight on the young tips of the pines, forest unfolding itself from earth to sky as you climbed hour after hour close to the ferns and boulders of the foaming mountain stream your pathway followed, forest too on the opposite side of the valley, with wastes of golden broom here and there, and fields of rye and barley swept gently by the breeze. You may walk day by day in Germany through such a paradise as this, and meet no one but a couple of children gathering wild strawberries, or an old peasant carrying faggots, or the goose-girl herding her fussy flock. You may even spend your summer holiday in a crowded watering-place, and yet escape quite easily into the heart of the forest where the crowd never comes. The crowd sits about on benches planted by a Verschoenerungsverein within a mile of their hotel, or on the verandah of the hotel itself. Some of the benches will command a view, and these will be most in demand. Those that are nearly a mile away will be reached by energetic elderly ladies, and at dinner you will hear that they have been to the Rabenstein this morning, and that the Aussicht was prachtvoll and the Luft herrlich, but that they must decline to go farther afield this afternoon as the morning's exertions have tired them. But some of die Herren say they are ready for anything, and even propose to scale the mountain behind the hotel and drink a glass of beer at the top. You readily agree to go with them, for by this time you know that even if you are a poor walker you can toddle half way up a German hill and down again; and the hotel itself has been built high above the valley. But after dinner you find that nearly everyone disappears for a siesta, while the few who keep outside are asleep over their coffee and cigar. Even Skat hardly keeps awake the three Herren who proposed a walk; and your friend the Frau Geheimrath Schultze warns you solemnly against the insanity of stirring a step before sundown; for summer in South Germany is summer indeed. The sun comes suddenly with power and glory, bursting every sheathed bud and ripening crops in such a hurry that you walk through new mown hayfields while your English calendar tells you it is still spring. Later in the year the heat is often intense all through the middle of the day, and the young men who make their excursions on foot start at dawn, so that they may arrive at a resting place by ten or eleven. "For many years our boys have wandered cheaply and simply through their German Fatherland," says a leaflet advertising a society that organises walking tours for girls; Saturday afternoon walks, Sunday walks, and holiday walks extending over six or eight days. "Simplicity, cheerful friendly intercourse, gaiety in fresh air, these are the companions of our pilgrimage.... We wish to provide the German nation with mothers who are at home in woods and meadows, who have learned to observe the beauties of nature, who have strengthened their health and their perceptions of everything that is great and beautiful by happy walks.... Anyone wanderfroh who has been at a higher school or who is still attending one is eligible. The card of membership only costs 3 marks for a single member and 4 marks for a whole family. Some of the excursions are planned to include brother pilgrims, and their character is gay and cheerful, without flirting or coquetry, a genuine friendly intercourse between girls and boys, young men and maidens, a pure and beautiful companionship such as no dancing lesson and no ballroom can create, and which is nevertheless the best training for life." So nowadays gangs of girls, and even mixed gangs of boys and girls, are to swarm through the pleasant forests of Germany, ascend the easy pathways of her mountains, and fill her country inns to overflowing. How horrified the little Backfisch would have been at such a suggestion, how unmaidenly her excellent aunt would have deemed it, how profoundly they would both have disapproved of any exercise that heightens the colour or disturbs the neatness of a young lady's toilet. I myself have heard German men become quite violent in their condemnation of Englishwomen who play games or take walks that make them temporarily dishevelled. It never seemed to occur to them that a woman might think their displeasure at her appearance of less account than her own enjoyment. "No," they said, "ask not that we should admire Miss Smith. She has just come in from a six hours' walk with her brother. Her face is as red as a poppy, her blouse is torn, and her boots are thick and muddy."

As a matter of fact, I had not asked them to admire Miss Smith. I knew that the lady they admired was arch, and had a persuasive giggle. Nevertheless I tried to break a lance for my countrywoman.

"You will see," I assured them, "she will remove the torn blouse and the muddy boots; and when she comes down her face will be quite pale."

"But she often looks like that," said one of the men. "At least once a day she plays a game or takes a walk that is more of a strain on her appearance than it should be. A young woman must always consider what effect things have on her appearance."

"Why?"

"Why?—Because she is a woman. There is no sense in a question like that. It goes back to the beginning of all things. It is unanswerable. Every young woman wishes to please."

"But is it not conceivable," I asked, "that a young woman may sometimes wish to please herself even at the expense of her appearance. Miss Smith assures me that she enjoys long walks and games,—oh, games that you have not seen her play here—hockey, for instance, and cricket."

"Verrueckt!" said the men in chorus. "A young woman should not think of herself at all. The Almighty has created her to please us, and it does not please us when she wears muddy boots and is as red as a poppy; at least, not while she is young. When she is married, and her place is in the kitchen, she may be as red as she pleases. That is a different matter."

"Is it?" I said, and I wanted to ask why again; but I held my tongue. Some questions, as they said, lead one too far afield.

The majority of visitors at a German watering-place take very little exercise of any kind. They sit about the forest as our seaside visitors sit about the sands, and though they cannot fill in their mornings by sea bathing, there are often medicinal baths that take as much time. Then the Badearzt probably prescribes so many glasses of water from his favourite spring each day, and a short walk after each glass, and a long rest after the midday dinner. Dinner is the really serious business of the day, and often occupies two hours. Where there is still a table d'hote it is a tedious, noisy affair, conducted in a stuffy room, and even if you are greedy enough to like the good things brought round you wish very soon that you were on a Cumberland fell-side with a mutton sandwich and a mountain stream. You wish it even although you hate mutton sandwiches and like meringues filled with Alpine strawberries and whipped cream; for the clatter and the clack going on around you, and the asphyxiating air, bring on a demoralising somnolence that you despise and cannot easily throw off. You sit about as lazily as anyone else half through the golden afternoon, drink a cup of coffee at four o'clock, look at mountains of cake, and then start for the restaurant, which is said to be eine gute Stunde from the hotel. You find, as you expected, that you saunter gently uphill on a broad winding road through the forest, and that you have a charming walk, but not what anyone in this country would call exercise till they were about seventy. In case you should be weary you pass seats every hundred yards or so, and when you have made your ascent you are received by a bustling waiter or a waitress in costume, who expects to serve you with beer or coffee before you venture down the hill again. By the time you get back to the hotel everyone is streaming in to supper, which is not as long as dinner, but quite as noisy. After supper everyone sits about the verandah or the garden. The men play cards, and smoke and drink coffee and Kirsch, the married women talk and do embroidery, the maidens stroll about in twos and threes or sit down to Halma. There are never many young men in these summer hotels, and the few there are herd with the older men or with each other more than young men do in this country. What we understand by flirtation is not encouraged, unless it is almost sure to lead to marriage; and what the Germans understand by flirtation is justly considered scandalous and reprehensible. For the Germans have taken the word into use, but taken away the levity and innocence of its meaning. They make it a term of serious reproach, and those who dislike us condemn the shocking prevalence of Flirt (they make a noun of the verb) in our decadent society.

The Pension price at a German summer hotel varies from four to fifteen marks, according to the general style of the establishment and the position of the rooms engaged. In one frequented by Germans the sitting-rooms are bare and formal, and as English visitors are not expected no English papers are taken. The season begins in June and lasts till the end of September, and you must be a successful hotel-keeper yourself to understand how so much can be provided for so little, miles away from any market. Many of these summer hotels have been built high up in the forest, and with no others near them. Some are run as a speculation by doctors. There is hardly a woman or girl in Germany who has not needed a Kur at some time of her life, or who does not need one every year if she has money and pretty gowns. The Badereise and everything connected with it serves the German professional humorist much as the mother-in-law and the drop too much serve the English one, perennially and faithfully. For the wife is determined to have her Badereise, and the husband is not inclined to pay for it, and the family doctor is called in to prescribe it. The artifices and complications arising suggest themselves, and to judge by the postcards and farces of Germany never weary the public they are designed to amuse.

In Berlin, when the hot weather comes, you see the family luggage and bedding going off to the sea-coast, for people who take a house take part of their bedding with them. There is so little seaside and so much Berlin that prices rule high wherever there is civilised accommodation. In Ruegen L1 a week per room is usual, and the room you get for that may be a very poor one. In most German watering-places, both on the coast and in the forest, you can have furnished rooms if you prefer them to hotel life, but as a rule you must either cook your own dinner or go out to a hotel for it. The cooking landlady is as rare in the country as in the town. Then in some places, at Oberhof, for instance, high upon the hills above Gotha, there are charming little furnished bungalows. Friends of mine go there or to one of the neighbouring villages every year, and never enter a hotel. They either take a servant with them, or find someone on the spot to do what is necessary. When there are no mineral waters or sea baths to give a place importance, Germans say they have come there to do a Luftkur. A delightful Frenchwoman who has written about England lately is amused by our everlasting babble about a "change." This one needs a change, she says, and that one is away for a change, and the other means to have a change next week. So the Germans amuse us by their eternal "cures." One tries air, and the other water, and the next iron, and the fourth sulphur, while the number and variety of nerve cures, Blutarmut cures, diet cures, and obesity cures are bewildering. It is difficult to believe that life in a hotel can cure anyone anywhere. However, in Germany, if you are under a capable Badearzt, there may be some salvation for you, since he orders your baths, measures your walks, and limits your diet so strictly. At one of the well-known places where people who eat too much all the year round go to reduce their figures, there is in the chief hotels a table known as the Corpulententisch, and a man who sits there is not allowed an ounce of bread beyond what his physician has prescribed.

But the German Luxusbad, the fashionable watering-place where the guests are cosmopolitan and the prices high—Marienbad, Homburg, Karlsbad, Schwalbach, Wiesbaden—all these places are as well known to English people as their own Bath and Buxton. Homburg they have swallowed, and I have somewhere come across a paragraph from an English newspaper objecting to the presence of Germans there. It is the quiet German watering-place where no English come that is interesting and not impossible to find. During the summer I spent in a Bavarian forest village I only saw one English person the whole time, except my own two or three friends. I heard the other day that the village and the life there have hardly altered at all, but that some English people have discovered the trout streams and come every year for fishing. In my time no one seemed to care about fishing. You went for walks in the forest. There was nothing else to do, unless you played Kegel and drank beer; for it was only a Luftkur. There was no Badearzt and no mineral water. To be sure, there were caves, huge limestone caves that you visited with a guide the day after you arrived, and never thought about again. There were various ruined castles, too, in the neighbourhood that made a goal for a drive in cases where there was a restaurant attached, and not far off there was a curious network of underground beer-cellars that I did not see, but which seemed to attract the men of our party sometimes. There were several inns in the straggling village, for the place lay high up amongst the dolomite hills of Upper Franconia, and people came there from the neighbouring towns for Waldluft. The summer I was there Richard Wagner passed through with his family, and we saw him more than once. He stayed at the Kurhaus, a hotel of more pretentions than the village inns, for it had a good sized garden and did not entertain peasants. My inn, recommended by an old Nuremberg friend, was owned and managed by a peasant proprietor, his wife, their elderly daughter, and two charming orphan grandchildren in their early teens. The peasant customers had as usual a large rough room to themselves, the town guests had their plain bare Speisesaal, and we Britishers possessed the summer house; so we were all happy. The whole glory of the place was in the forest; for it was not flat sandy forest that has no undergrowth, and wearies you very soon with its sameness and its still, oppressive air. It was up hill and down dale forest, full of lovely glades, broken by massive dolomite rocks; the trees not set in serried rows, but growing for the most part as the birds and the wind planted them; a varied natural forest tended but not dragooned by man. The flowers there were a delight to us, for we arrived early enough in the year to find lilies of the valley growing in great quantities amongst the rocks, while a little later the stream and pathways were bordered by oak and beech fern and by many wild orchises that are rare now with us. It was not here, however, but in another German forest, where, one day when I had no time to linger, I met people with great bunches of the Cypripedium calceolus that they had gathered as we gather primroses. At the Bavarian watering-place we had the whole forest as much to ourselves as the summer house, for no one seemed to wander farther than the seats placed amongst the trees by the Verschoenerungsverein.

"Warum willst du weiter schweifen Sieh das Gute liegt so nah,"

says Goethe, and most Germans out for their summer holiday seem to take his advice in the most literal way, and find their happiness as near home as they possibly can.

When you begin to think about the actual process of travelling in Germany, the tiresome business of getting from the city to the forest village, for instance, you at once remember both the many complaints you have heard Germans make of our system, or rather want of system, and the bitter scorn poured on German fussiness by travelling Britons. The ways of one nation are certainly not the ways of another in this respect. Directly I cross the German frontier I know that I am safe from muddle and mistakes, that I need not look after myself or my luggage, that I cannot get into a wrong train or alight at a wrong station, or suffer any injury through carelessness or mismanagement. Everything is managed for me, and on long journeys in the corridor trains things are well managed. But your carriage is far more likely to be unpleasantly crowded in Germany than in England; and as hand-luggage is not charged for, the public takes all it can, and fills the racks, the seats, and the floor with heavy bags and portmanteaux. In bygone years the saying was that none travelled first class save fools and Englishmen, but nowadays Germans travel in their own first-class carriages a good deal. The third-class accommodation is wretched, more fit for animals than men. In some districts there are fourth-class uncovered seats on the roof of the carriages, but I have only seen these used in summer. When I was last in Germany a year ago there was much excitement and indignation over certain changes that were to make travelling dearer for everyone. All luggage in the van was to be paid for in future, first-class fares were to be raised, and no return tickets issued.

But you must not think that when you have bought a ticket from one place to another you can get to it by any train you please. "I want the 10.15 to Entepfuhl," you say to the nearest and biggest official you can see; and he looks at your ticket.

"Personenzug," he says in a withering way,—"the 10.15 is an express."

You say humbly that you like an express.

"Then you must get an extra ticket," he says, "This one only admits you to slow trains."

So you get your extra ticket, and then you wait with everyone else in a big room where most people are eating and drinking to wile away the time. Don't imagine that you can find your empty train, choose your corner, and settle yourself comfortably for your journey as you can in England. You are well looked after, but if you are used to England you never quite lose the impression in Germany that if you are not an official or a soldier you must be a criminal, and that if you move an inch to right or left of what is prescribed you will hear of it. Just before the train starts the warders open your prison doors and shout out the chief places the train travels to. So you hustle along with everyone else, and get the best place you can, and are hauled out by a watchful conductor when you arrive. If it is a small station there is sure to be a dearth of porters, but you get your luggage by going to the proper office and giving up the slip of paper you received when it was weighed. Never forget, as I have known English people do, that you cannot travel in Germany without having your luggage weighed and receiving the Schein for it. If you lose the Schein you are undone. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen, because it would be a tragedy without precedent, but it is impossible that German officials would surrender a trunk without receiving a Schein in exchange; at least, not without months of rigmarole and delay. Even when it is the official who blunders the public suffers for it. We were travelling some years ago from Leipzig to London when the guard examining our tickets let one blow away. Luckily some German gentlemen in the carriage with us saw what happened, gave us their addresses, and offered to help us in any way they could. But we had to buy a fresh ticket and trust to getting our money back by correspondence. Six months later we did get it back, and this is an exact translation of the letter accompanying it:—

"In answer to your gracious letter of the 26th September, we inform your wellbornship, respectfully, that the Ticket Office here is directed, in regard to the ticket by you on the 23rd of September taken, by the guard in checking lost ticket Leipzig-London via Calais 2nd class, the for the distance Hanover to London outpaid fare of 71 m. 40 pf. by post to you to refund."

One must admire the mind that can compose a sentence like that without either losing its way or turning dizzy.

But if you want to see what Germans can give you in the way of order and comfort you must leave the railroad and travel in one of their big American liners. Even if you are not going to America, but only from Hamburg to Dover, it is well worth doing. The interest of it begins the day before, when you take your trunks to the docks and see the steerage passengers assembled for their start. They are a strange gipsy-looking folk, for the most part from the eastern frontier of Germany, bare-footed and wearing scraps of brighter colours than western people choose. When we arrived the doctor was examining their eyes in an open shed, and we saw them huddled together in families waiting their turn. There was no weeping and wailing as there is when the Irish leave their shores. These people looked scared by the bustle of departure, and concerned for the little children with them, and for their poor bundles of clothes; but they did not seem unhappy. In the luggage bureau itself you came across the emigrant upsides with fortune, the successful business German returning to America after a summer holiday in his native land, and speaking the most hideously corrupt and vulgar English ever heard. The most harsh and nasal American is heavenly music compared with nasal American spoken by a German tongue. The great ship was crowded with people of this type, and the resources of Europe could hardly supply them with the luxuries they wanted. We had a special train next day to Cuxhaven, and an army of blue-coated white-gloved stewards to meet us on the platform, and a band to play us on board. Our private rooms were hung with pale blue silk and painted with white enamel and furnished with satin-wood; the passages had marble floors; there were quantities of flowers everywhere, and books, and the electric light. In fact, it was the luxurious floating hotel a modern liner must be to entice such people as those I saw in the luggage bureau to travel in it. The meals were most elaborate and excellent; and I feel sure that any royal family happening to travel incognito on the ship would have been satisfied with them. But my neighbours at table were not. "We shall not dine down here again," said one of them, speaking with the twang I have described. "After to-night we shall have all our meals in the Ritz Restaurant." I looked at her reflectively, and next day after breakfast I stood on the bridge and looked at the other emigrants. The women were singing an interminable droning mass, the men sat about on sacks and played cards, the bare-footed children scuttled to and fro.

"One day some of these people will come back in a Luxus cabin," said a German acquaintance to me.

"And they will dine in the Ritz Restaurant, because our dinner is not good enough for them," I prophesied.

Directly we got to Dover every feature of our arrival helped us to feel at home. There was a batch of large good-natured looking policemen, whose function I cannot explain, but it was agreeable to see them again. There was no order or organisation of any kind to protect and annoy you. The authorities had thoughtfully painted the letters of the alphabet on the platform where the luggage was deposited, and you were supposed to find your own trunks in front of your own letter. I, full of German ideas still, waited a weary time near my letter. "You'll never get them that way," said an English friend. "You'd much better go to the end of the platform and pick them out as you can." So I went, and found a huge pile of luggage pitched anyhow, anywhere, and picked out my own, seized a porter, made him shoulder things, and followed him at risk to life and limb. All the luggage leaving Dover was being tumbled about at our feet, and when we tried to escape it we fell over what had arrived. Porters were rushing to and fro with trunks, just as disturbed ants do with eggs, but in this case it was the German passengers who felt disturbed. They were not used to such ways. When they had to duck under a rope to reach the waiting train they grew quite angry, and said they did not think much of the British Empire. But there was worse to come for us all. Breakfast on board had been early and a fog had delayed our arrival. We were all hungry and streamed into the refreshment room. We filled it.

"What is there to eat?" said one.

The young woman with the hauteur and detachment of her calling did not speak, but just glanced at a glass dish under a glass cover. There were two stale looking ham sandwiches.

"Well," says my Englishman, when I tell him this true story—"we are not a greedy nation."

"But how about the trunks that were not under their right letters?" I ask.

"Who in his senses wants to find trunks under letters?" says he. "The proper place for trunks is the end of the platform. Then you can tear out of the train and find yours first and get off quickly. When you are all dragooned and drilled an ass comes off as well as anyone else. You place a premium on stupidity."

"But that is an advantage to the ass," I say; "and in a civilised State why should the ass not have as good a chance as anyone else?"

The argument that ensues is familiar, exhausting, and interminable. "An ass is an ass wherever he lives," says someone at last; and everyone is delighted to have a proposition put forward to which he can honestly agree.



CHAPTER XXIV

PEASANT LIFE

The peasant proprietors of Southern Germany are a comfortable, prosperous class. "A rich peasant" begins your comic story as often as "a rich Jew." The peasants own their farms and a bit of forest, as well as a vineyard or a hop garden. They never pretend to be anything but peasants; but when they can afford it they like to have a son who is a doctor, a schoolmaster, or a pastor. Unless you have special opportunities you can only watch peasant life from outside in Germany, for you could not stay in a Bauernhaus as you would in a farmhouse in England. At least, you could not live with the family. In some of the summer resorts the peasants make money by furnishing bedrooms and letting them to Herrschaften, but the Herrschaften have to get their meals at the nearest inn. The inner life of the peasant family is rougher than the inner life of the farmer's family in England, though their level of prosperity is as high, possibly higher. You cannot imagine the English farmer and his wife putting on costly and picturesque mediaeval costumes every Sunday and solemnly marching to church in them; but the German Bauer still does this quite simply and proudly. In some parts of the Black Forest every valley has its own costume, so that you know where a man lives by the clothes he wears. There is one valley where all the girls are pretty, and on festive occasions or for church they wear charming transparent black caps with wings to them. There is another valley where the men are big-boned and blackavised, with square shaven chins and spare bodies, rather like our English legal type; and they go to church in scarlet breeches, long black velvet coats, and black three-cornered hats. Their women-folk wear gay-coloured skirts and mushroom hats loaded with heavy poms-poms. In Cassel there are most curious costumes to be seen still on high days and holidays; from Berlin, people go to the Spreewald to see the Wendish peasants, and in Bavaria there is still some colour and variety of costume. But everywhere you hear that these costumes are dying out. The new generation does not care to label itself, for it finds staedtische Kleider cheaper and more convenient. The Wendish girls seem to abide by the ways of their forefathers, for they go to service in Berlin on purpose to save money for clothes. They buy or are presented with two or three costumes each year, and when they marry they have a stock that will last a lifetime and will provide them with the variety their pride demands. For they like to have a special rig-out for every occasion, and a great many changes for church on Sundays. In Catholic Germany a procession on a saint's day seems to have stepped down from a stained-glass window, the women's gowns are so vivid and their bodies so stiff and angular. But to see the German peasantry in full dress you must go to a Kirchweih, a dance, or a wedding.

You can hardly be in Germany in summer without seeing something of peasants' weddings, and of the elaborate rites observed at them. Different parts of the empire have different ways, and even in one district you will find much variety. We saw several peasant weddings in the Black Forest one summer, and no two were quite alike. Sometimes when we were walking through the forest we met a Brautwagen: the great open cart loaded with the furniture and wedding presents the bride was taking as part of her dowry to her new home. It would be piled with bedding, wooden bedsteads, chests of drawers, and pots and pans; and gay-coloured ribbons would be floating from each point of vantage. Sometimes the bridal pair was with the cart, the young husband in his wedding clothes walking beside the horse, the bride seated amongst her possessions. Sometimes a couple of men in working clothes, probably the bridegroom and a friend, were carrying the things beforehand, so that the new home should be ready directly after the wedding. We happened to be staying in the Black Forest when our inn-keeper's daughter was going to marry a young doctor, the son of a rich peasant in a neighbouring valley, and we were asked to the wedding. Our landlord ran two inns, the one in which we stayed and another a dozen miles away, which was managed by his wife and daughters. The wife's hotel was in a fashionable watering-place, and offered a smarter background for a wedding than the one in our out-of-the-world little town. It is the proper moment now for you to object that this could not have been a "peasant" wedding at all, and has no place in a picture of peasant life; and I concede that the bride and bridegroom, their parents, and certain of their friends all wore staedtische Kleider. The bride was in black silk, and the bridegroom in his professional black coat. But nearly all the guests were peasants, and wore peasant costume; and the heavy long-spun festivities were those usual at a peasant's wedding. We started with our bicycles at six o'clock in the morning, and soon found ourselves in a straggling procession of carts and pedestrians come from all the valleys round. The main road was like a road on a fair day. Everyone knew that there was to be a Hochzeit at R., a big splendid Hochzeit, and everyone who could afford the time and the money was going to eat and drink and dance at it. Everyone was in a holiday mood, and all along the lovely forest road we exchanged greetings with our fellow-guests and gathered scraps of information about the feast we were on our way to join. Every inn we passed had set out extra tables, and expected extra custom that day, and when we got to one within a mile of R. we found the garden crowded. People were ready by this time for their second breakfast, and were having it here before making their appearance at the wedding. We were hungry and thirsty ourselves, so we sat down under the shade of trees and ate belegtes Butterbrot and drank Pilsener as our neighbours did. We arrived at R. just in time to remove the dust of the road, and then walk, as we found our hosts expected us to do, in the wedding procession. First came the bride and bridegroom, and then a long crocodile of bridesmaids, all wearing the curious high bead wreaths possessed by every village girl of standing in this part of Germany. We witnessed the civil ceremony, but though I have been present at several German civil weddings I remember as little about them as about a visit to the English District Council Office where I have sometimes been to pay taxes. In both cases there is a bare room, an indifferent official, some production of official papers, and the thing is done. When the bride and bridegroom had been made legally man and wife they headed the waiting procession again, and proceeded to the church for the real, the religious ceremony. It was packed with people, and the service, which was Catholic, lasted a long time. When it was over everyone streamed back to the hotel, and as soon as possible the Hochzeitsmahl began; but though we were politely bidden to it we politely excused ourselves, for we knew that the feast would last for hours and would be more than we could bear. Till evening, they said, it would last, and there would be many speeches, and it was a broiling summer day. The guests we perceived to be a mixed company of peasants in costume, of inn-keepers and their families in ordinary clothes, and of university students in black coats who were removed from the peasantry by their education, but not by birth and affection. The invited guests sat down to dinner in the Speisesaal, but the hotel garden was crowded with country people who paid for what they consumed. The dinner served to us and to others out here was an unusually good one, so we discovered that people who attend a wedding unasked get a spectacle, a dance, and extra fine food for their money. Towards the end of the afternoon before we left R. we looked in at the ballroom, where dancing had begun already.

At another peasant's wedding in the Black Forest we saw some quaint customs observed that were omitted at R. In this case the bride and bridegroom were themselves peasants, and wore the costume of their valley. The bride was said to be well endowed, but she was extremely plain. Amongst German peasants, however, beauty hardly counts. What a woman is worth to a man, he reckons partly in hard cash and partly in the work she can do. There were two charmingly pretty girls in the Bavarian village where we once spent a summer, but we were told that they had not the faintest chance of marriage, because, though they belonged to a respectable family, they were orphans and dowerless. Auerbach's enchanting story of Barfuessele, in which the village Cinderella marries the rich peasant, is a fairy story and not a picture of real life. The feast at this second wedding we saw must have cost a good deal, for it was prepared at our hotel for a large crowd of guests and lasted for hours. It was an agitating wedding in some of its aspects. The day before we had been startled at irregular but frequent intervals by loud gunshots, and we were told that these were fired in welcome of the wedding guests as they arrived. When the bride appeared with her Brautwagen and an escort of young men there was a volley in her honour. We did not go to church to see that wedding, as we were not attracted by the bridal pair; but we watched the crowd from our windows, and as it was a wet day, endured the sounds of revelry that lasted for hours after the feast began. There was no dancing at this marriage, and as each batch of guests departed a brass band just outside our rooms played them a send-off. It was a jerky irritating performance, because the instant the object of their attentions disappeared round the turn of the hill they stopped short, and only began a new tune when there was a new departure. We were rather glad when the day came to an end. In the Black Forest you always know where there is a wedding, because two small fir trees are brought from the forest decked with flying coloured streamers of paper or ribbon, and set on either side of the bride's front door.

The German peasant loves his pipe and his beer, and on a Sunday afternoon his game of Kegel; but on high days and holidays he likes to be dancing. He and she will trudge for miles to dance at some distant village inn. You meet them dressed in their best clothes, walking barefoot and carrying clean boots and stockings. How they can dance in tight boots after a long hot walk on a dusty road, you must be a German peasant yourself to understand. The dance I remember best took place in a barn belonging to a village inn in Bavaria. I went with several English friends to look on at it, and the men of our party danced with some of the village girls. The room was only lighted by a few candles, and it was so crowded that while everyone was dancing everyone was hustled. But we were told that anyone who chose could "buy the floor" for a time by giving sixpence or a shilling to the band. Two of the Englishmen did this, and the crowd looked on in solemn approval while they waltzed once or twice round with the pretty granddaughters of our hosts. It was a scene I have often wished I could paint, the crowd was so dense, and the faces, from our point of view, so foreign. The candles only lifted the semi-darkness here and there, but where their light fell it flashed on the bright-coloured handkerchiefs which the women of this village twisted round their heads like turbans, and pinned across their bosoms. I think it is absurd, though, to say that German peasants dance well. They enjoy the exercise immensely, but are heavy and loutish in their movements, and they flounder about in a grotesque way with their hands on each other's shoulders. At a Kirchweih they dance in the open air.

A Kirchweih is a feast to celebrate the foundations of the village church, and it takes the form of a fair. The preparations begin the day before, when the roundabouts and shooting booths are put up in the appointed field. On the day before the Kirchweih in our Bavarian village I found the inn-keeper's wife cooking what we call Berlin pancakes in a cauldron of boiling fat, the like of which I have never seen before or since for size. It must have held gallons. All day long she stood there throwing in the cinnamon flavoured batter, and taking out the little crisp brown balls. They are, it seems, a favourite dainty at a Bavarian Kirchweih, and must be provided in large quantities. On the fair field itself the food offered by the stall-keepers seemed to be chiefly enormous slabs of shiny gingerbread made in fanciful shapes, such as hearts, lyres, and garlands, cheap sweetmeats, and the small boiled sausages the artless German eats in public without a knife and fork.

The Kirchweih is the chief event of the summer in a German village, and is talked of for weeks beforehand. The peasants stream in from all the villages near, and join in the dancing and the shooting matches. When the day is fine and the fair field has a background of wooded hills, you see where the librettists of pre-Wagnerian days went for their stage effects. All the characters of many a German opera are there correctly dressed, joining in the songs and dances, shooting for wagers, making love, sometimes coming to blows. But you may look on at a Kirchweih from morning till night without seeing either horseplay or drunkenness. Not that the German peasant is an opera hero in his inner life. He is a hard-working man, God-fearing on the whole, stupid and stolid often, narrowly shrewd often, having his eye on the main chance. When he is stupid but not God-fearing he dresses himself and his wife in their best clothes, puts his insurance papers in his pockets, sets his thatched house on fire, and goes for a walk. Then he is surprised that he is caught and punished. Fires are frequent in German villages, and in a high wind and where the roofs are of straw destruction is complete sometimes. You often come across the blackened remains of houses, and you always feel anxious about the new buildings that will replace them. It is a good deal to say, but I believe our own jerry-builders are outdone in florid vulgarity by German villadom, and the German atrocities will last longer than ours, because the building laws are more stringent. But the old Bauernhaus still to be seen in most parts of the Black Forest is dignified and beautiful. The Swiss chalet is a poor gim-crack thing in comparison. Sometimes the German house has a shingled roof, and sometimes a thatched roof dark with age, and it has drooping eaves and an outside staircase and balcony of wood. It shelters the farm cattle in the stables on the ground floor, and the family on the upper floor, and in the roof there are granaries. But the beautiful old thatched roofs are gradually giving place to the slate ones, because they burn so easily, and fire, when it comes, is the village tragedy. I can remember when a fire in a big German commercial town was proclaimed by a beating drum, the noisy parade of fire-men, the clanging of bells, and all the hullaballoo that panic and curiosity could make. But last year, in Berlin, looking at houses like the tower of Babel, I said something of fire, and was told that no one felt nervous nowadays, the arrangements for dealing with it were so complete.

"People just look out of the window, see that there is a fire next door, or above or beneath them, and go about their business," said my hosts. "They know that the fire brigade will do their business and put it out."

I did not see a fire in Berlin, so I had no opportunity of witnessing the remarkable coolness of the Berliner in circumstances the ordinary man finds trying; but I saw a fire in my Bavarian village, and there were not many cool people there. The summons came in the middle of the night with the hoarse insistent clanging of the church bell, the sudden start into life of the sleeping village, the sounds in the house and in the street of people astir and terrified. Then there came the brilliant reflection of the flames in the opposite windows, and the roar and crackle of fire no one at first knew where. It was only a barn after all, a barn luckily detached from other buildings. Yet when we got into the street we found most of the population removing its treasures, as if danger was imminent. All the beds and chairs and pots and pans of the place seemed to be on the cobble-stones, and the women wailed and the children wept. "But the village is not on fire," we said. "It may be at any moment," they assured us, and were scandalised by our cold-bloodedness. For we had not carted our trunks into the street, but hastened towards the burning barn to see if we could help the men and boys carrying water. The weather was still and the barn isolated, so we knew there was no danger of the fire spreading. But the villagers were too excitable and too panic-stricken to be convinced of this. All their lives they had dreaded fire, and when the flames broke out so near them they thought that their houses were doomed.

Next to fire the German peasant hates beggars and gipsies. We were six months in the Black Forest and only met one beggar the whole time, and he was a decent-looking old man who seemed to ask alms unwillingly. But in some parts of Germany there are a great many most unpleasant-looking tramps. The village council puts up a notice that forbids begging, and has a general fund from which it sends tramps on their way. But it does not seem able to deal with the caravans of gipsies that come from Hungary and Bohemia. In a Thuringian village we came down one morning to find our inn locked and barricaded as if a riot was expected, and an attack. Even the shutters were drawn and bolted. "Was ist denn los?" we asked in amazement, and were told that the gipsies were coming.

"But will they do you any harm?" we asked.

"They will steal all they can lay hands on," our landlady assured us. She was a widow, and her brewer, the only man in her employ, was, we supposed, standing guard over his own house. We thought the panic seemed extreme, but we had never encountered Hungarian gipsies on the warpath, and we did not know how many were coming. So, after assuring our excited little Frau that we would stand by her as well as we could, we went to an upper window to watch for the enemy. Presently the procession began, a straggling procession of the dirtiest, meanest-looking ruffians ever seen. There was waggon after waggon, swarming with ragamuffins of both sexes and all ages. The men were mostly on foot, casting furtive glances to right and left, evident snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, truculent, ragged, wearing evil-looking knives by their sides. During their transit the village had shut itself up, as Coventry did for Godiva's ride. When we all ventured forth again the talk was of missing poultry and rifled fruit trees. The geese had luckily started for their day on the high pastures before the bad folk came; for in a German village there is always a gooseherd. Sometimes it is a little boy or girl, sometimes an old woman, and early in the morning whoever has the post collects the whole flock, drives it to a chosen feeding ground, spends the day there, and brings it back at night. It must be a contemplative life, and in dry weather pleasant. I think it would suit a philosopher if he could choose his days. In our Franconian village the gooseherd was a little boy, vastly proud of his job. Every morning, long before we were up, he would stride past our windows piping the same tune, and at the sound of it every goose in the village would waddle out from her night quarters and join the cackling fussy crowd at his heels. Every evening as dusk fell he came back again, still piping the same tune, and then the geese would detach themselves in little groups from the main body and find their own homes as surely as cows do.

Every rural district of Germany has its own novelist. Fritz Reuter, Frenssen, Rosegger, Sudermann all write of country life in the places they know best. In Hauptmann's beautiful plays you see the peasant through a veil of poetry and mysticism. Auerbach, I am told, is out of fashion. His stories end well mostly, his construction one must admit is childish, and his characters change their natures with the suddenness of a thunderbolt to suit his plot. Yet when I have Sehnsucht for Germany, and cannot go there in reality, I love to go in fancy where Auerbach leads. He takes you to a house in the Black Forest, and you sit at breakfast with the family eating Haferbrei out of one bowl. You know the people gathered there as well as if you had been with them all the summer, and you know them now in winter time when the roads are deep in snow and a wolf is abroad in the forest. The story I am thinking of was published in 1860, and I believe that there are no wolves now in the Black Forest. But as far as one outside peasant life can judge, I doubt whether anything else has changed much. You hear the history of the Grossbauer, the rich farmer of the district whose breed is as strong and daring as the breed of the Volsungs. Seven years ago the only son and heir of this forest magnate, Adam Roettman, loved a poor girl called Martina, and their child Joseph is now six years old. Adam is still faithful to Martina, but his parents will not consent to their marriage, and insists on betrothing him to an heiress as rich as he will be, Heidenmueller's Toni. The whole village looks on at the romance and sides with Martina; for Adam's mother, die wilde Roettmaennin, is one of those stormy viragoes I myself have met amongst German women. She masters her husband and son with her temper. She is so rich that she has more Schmalz than she can use, and so mean that she would rather let it go bad than give it to the poor. At midnight, when the roads are deep in snow, she sends for the Pfarrer, and when he risks his life and goes because he thinks she is dying, he finds she is merely bored and wanted his company; for she has been used to think that she could tyrannise over all men because she was richer and more determined than most. Next day she gets up, orders her husband and son to put on Sunday clothes, and well wrapped up in Betten drives with them to the Heidenmuehle, where Adam is formally betrothed to Toni. The girl knows all about Martina, but she consents because she would marry anyone to escape from her stepmother, who treats her cruelly, and in order to hurt her feelings has given her mother's cup to the Knecht. After the betrothal the two fathers sit together and drink hot spiced wine, the two mothers gossip together, and the Brautpaar talk sadly about Martina, who should be Adam's wife, and Joseph who is his child. At last Adam could bear it no longer. He would go straight to Martina, he said, and he would be with Toni again before the Christmas tree was lighted; and then he would either break with Toni or feel free to marry her. "The bride stared at Adam with amazement as he put on his grey cloak and his fur cap and seized his pointed stick. He looked both handsome and terrible." For he is one of the heroes Germans love, a giant who once held a bull by its horns while Martina escaped from it, who is called the Gaul, because for a wager he once carried the cart and the load a cart horse should have carried, and who on this wild winter night meets the wolf in the forest and kills it with his stick. So you see him striding through the snow-bound forest to the village where Martina lives, dragging the wolf after him, as strong as Siegfried, as credulous as a child, ready to believe that the voices of his father and his child both looking for him in the snow are witches' voices. But when he gets to the village he finds that his child, so long disowned and disregarded, is really lost, and is looking for him in the snow. The hatter who tramps from village to village hung with hats met him, and tried to turn him back. But the child said he had come out to find his father, and must go on. Then every man in the village assembles at the Pfarrhaus, and, led by the Pfarrer's brother-in-law (an eventual husband for Heidenmueller's Toni), sets out to find Joseph in the snow. Before they start Adam vows before the whole community that whether the child is alive or dead nothing shall ever part him again from Martina, and when he has made this vow you see the whole company depart in various directions carrying torches, ladders, axes, and long ropes. Meanwhile the child, after some alarms and excursions, meets three angels (children masquerading), who take him with them to the mill where Toni has just lighted the Christmas tree. She rescues Joseph from die wilde Roettmaennin, and that same night, her father dying of his carouse, she becomes a rich heiress and free of her wicked stepmother. Joseph's hostile grandfathers, after a fight in the snow, make friends, the obliging Pfarrer marries Adam and Martina at midnight, and soon after the wilde Roettmaennin who will not be reconciled leaves this world. So everyone who deserves happiness gets it. But though you only half believe in the story you have been in the very heart of the Black Forest, the companion of its people, the observer of their most intimate talk and ways. You have heard the women gossip at the well, you have made friends with Leegart the seamstress, who believes that quite against her will she is gifted with supernatural powers. There is Haespele, too, who made Joseph his new boots, and would marry Martina if he could; and there is David, the father of Martina, who was hardly kept from murdering his daughter when she came home in disgrace, and whose grandson becomes the apple of his eye. The whole picture of these people is vivid and enchanting, touched with quaint detail, veined with the tragedy of their lives, glowing with the warm human qualities that knit them to each other. The South German loves to tell you that his country is ein gesegnetes Land, a blessed country, flowing with milk and honey; and whether you are reading Auerbach's peasant stories or actually staying amongst his peasant folk, you get this impression of their natural surroundings. Nature is kind here, grows forest for her people on the hill-tops, and wine, fruit and corn in her sheltered valleys, ripens their fruit in summer, gives them heavy crops of hay, and sends soft warm rain as well as sun to enrich their pastures.