Home Life In Germany Part 13

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 pa.s.s 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 Indeed, for all I know the last one may have vanished and been replaced by a motor bus.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 pa.s.s 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 f.a.ggots, 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 _Verschonerungsverein_ 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 gla.s.s 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; Sat.u.r.day 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 members.h.i.+p 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sures me that she enjoys long walks and games,--oh, games that you have not seen her play here--hockey, for instance, and cricket."

"_Verruckt!_" 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 gla.s.ses of water from his favourite spring each day, and a short walk after each gla.s.s, 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 c.u.mberland 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 pa.s.s 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 1 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 fis.h.i.+ng. In my time no one seemed to care about fis.h.i.+ng. 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 quant.i.ties 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 _Verschonerungsverein_.

"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 cla.s.s save fools and Englishmen, but nowadays Germans travel in their own first-cla.s.s carriages a good deal. The third-cla.s.s accommodation is wretched, more fit for animals than men. In some districts there are fourth-cla.s.s 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-cla.s.s 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 wellborns.h.i.+p, 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sengers a.s.sembled for their start. They are a strange gipsy-looking folk, for the most part from the eastern frontier of Germany, bare-footed and wearing sc.r.a.ps 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages had marble floors; there were quant.i.ties 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 s.h.i.+p 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 tw.a.n.g 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 ma.s.s, 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 rus.h.i.+ng to and fro with trunks, just as disturbed ants do with eggs, but in this case it was the German pa.s.sengers 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 gla.s.s dish under a gla.s.s 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 a.s.s comes off as well as anyone else.

You place a premium on stupidity."

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

The argument that ensues is familiar, exhausting, and interminable.

"An a.s.s is an a.s.s 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 cla.s.s. "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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 Ca.s.sel 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 _stadtische 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-gla.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 _stadtische 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 sc.r.a.ps of information about the feast we were on our way to join. Every inn we pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.terbrot_ and drank Pilsener as our neighbours did. We arrived at R.