Chapter 25

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.

In the eastern provinces of Germany the conditions of life amongst the poor are most unhappy. Here the land belongs to large proprietors, and until modern times the people born on the land belonged to the landlords too. No man could leave the village where he was born without permission, and he had to work for his masters without pay. Even in the memory of living men the whip was quite commonly used. In her most interesting account of a Silesian village,[3] Gertrud Dyhrenfurth says that the present condition of the peasantry in this region compares favourably with former times, but she admits that they are still miserably overworked and underpaid. They are no longer legally obliged to submit to corporal punishment, nor can they be forced to live where they were born, and as they emigrate in large numbers, scarcity of labour has brought about slightly improved conditions for those remaining. But a man's wage is still a mark a day in summer and 90 pf. in winter. A woman earns 60 pf. in summer and 50 pf. in winter. Besides receiving these wages, a family regularly employed lives rent free and gets a fixed amount of coal, and at harvest time some corn and brandy. You cannot say the family has a house or cottage to itself, because the system is to build long bare-looking barracks in which numbers of working families herd like rabbits in a warren. In modern times each family has a kitchen to itself, so there is one warm room where the small children can be kept alive. In former times there was a general kitchen, and in the rooms appointed to each family no heating apparatus; therefore, if the children were not to die of cold, they had to be carried every morning to the kitchen, where there was a fire. The present plan has grave disadvantages, as in one room the whole family has to sleep, eat, wash, and cook for themselves and for the animals in their care. The furniture consists of two or three bedsteads with straw mattresses and feather plumeaux, shelves for pots and pans, a china cupboard with glass doors, a table in the window, and wooden benches with backs. This installation is quite luxurious compared with that of a milkmaid's or a stablemaid's surroundings sixty or seventy years ago. "Her home consisted of a plank slung from the stable roof and furnished with a sack of straw and a plumeau. Her small belongings were in a little trunk in a wooden niche, her clothes in a chest that stood in the garret." Here is the life history of an unmarried working woman of eighty-six born in a Silesian village. When she left school she was apprenticed to a thrasher, with a yearly wage of four thalers, besides two chemises and two aprons as a Christmas present. Even in those days this money did not suffice for clothing, although even in winter the women wore no warm under-garments. Quite unprotected, they waded up to the middle in snow.... In summer the girl was in the barn and at work by dawn; in winter they threshed by artificial light. A bit of bread taken in the pocket served as breakfast. The first warm meal was taken at midday. When the farm work was finished there was spinning to do till 10 o'clock.

This woman "bettered herself" as she grew older till she was earning 35 thalers (L5, 5s. 0d.) a year; she accustomed herself to live on this sum, and when wages increased, to put by the surplus. So in her old age she is a capitalist, has saved enough for a decent funeral, for certain small legacies, and for such an amazing luxury as a tin foot-warmer. The family she faithfully served for so many years allows her coal, milk and potatoes, and when necessary pays for doctor and medicine. Her weekly budget is as follows--

Pf. Rent 50 Bread 25 Rolls 5 __ Carried forward 80

Pf. Brought forward 80 1/4 lb. butter 25 1/4 lb. coffee and chicory 25 Sugar 15 1 lb. flour 14 Salt 1 Light 10 Washing 5 ------ 1m. 75 ======

Meat is of course out of the question, and in discussing another budget Fraeulein Dyhrenfurth shows that a family of eight people could only afford three quarters of a pound a week. Their yearly expenses amounted to 455 m. 26 pf., so each one of the eight had to be fed and clothed for about 1s. 1d. a week. Women are still terribly overworked in the fields. They used to begin at four o'clock in the morning, and go on till nine at night,--a working day, that is, of seventeen hours for a wife and the mother of a family. When the family at the mansion had the great half-yearly wash, the village women called in to help began at midnight, and stood at the washtub till eight o'clock next evening, twenty hours, that is, on end. In 1880 the working day was shortened, and only lasts now from five in the morning till seven at night, with a two hours' pause for dinner and shorter pauses for breakfast and vesper. But, on the other hand, women do work now that only men did in former times. The threshing of corn has fallen entirely into their hands, and they follow a plough yoked with oxen. Both kinds of work are heavy and unpleasant. But women are glad to get the threshing in winter time when other work fails, and it is often on this account that the proprietors do not introduce threshing machines.

At certain times of the year Poles swarm over the frontier into the eastern provinces of Germany, but Fraeulein Dyhrenfurth says that they do not work for lower wages. The women have no house-keeping to do, and can therefore give more hours to field labour. One woman prepares a meal for a whole gang of her country people, and they live almost entirely on bread, potatoes, and brandy. They do not mix with the Germans, but spend their evenings and Sundays in playing the harmonium, dancing, and drinking. They return every year, are always foreigners in Germany, and are very industrious, religious, contented, and cheerful, but inclined to drink and fight.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Ein schlesisches Dorf und Rittergut_, von Gertrud Dyhrenfurth. Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot.