households-four o'clock coffee, like English tea, is not an excuse for a snack, but a sacred rite and I cannot remember three middle-class Germans who take sugar now. In Büdingen it is a forgotten custom; nor will there be butter on the table, nor an egg nor a roll of white bread nor milk. And the houses will be cold. Last winter they were chilly; this winter they are cold.

A cold room in a middle-class German provincial house is more than a cold room. It is the symbol of the crumpling of the old German conception of Gemüthlichkeit, and "solid comfort" was more than a conception in old Germany; it was a religion. The word Gemüthlichkeit itself played an extraordinary social rôle, with all that it implied; a good meal and plenty of the meal, a few glasses of beer or wine, naïve physical well-being finding choric utterance in a dolorous folksong, a bouquet of wild flowers, scrubbed and rosy children imbued with the proper reverence for adults, a feather-bed that had been aired half a day daily for half a century, a just sufficient income to retire on in old age, and a just large enough garden to putter round in. No love of possessions and position for the love of ostentation. Only a wise provincial obeisance to position and cherished possessions as the sensible appurtenances of comfort, that is all.

Germany is no longer gemüthlich. The rigors of the situation demand an economy that is becoming something more or less than economy. Nothing is wasted of clothes or food or fuel, because scarcely anything new is used. Slowly the great number of items that went to make up provincial comfort that were the appurtenances of pro

vincial joys and the instruments of provincial culture are being one by one forgone. Newspaper subscriptions are canceled: the "Frankfurter Zeitung" was brought to hundreds of houses before 1920; now it is not brought to a dozen. Excursions to Frankfort to the opera or theater are things as definitely of the past as the former theater train that brought one back to Büdingen at midnight. When they must travel, they no longer ride third class, or, as some did, second, but fourth class. Meat is no longer served once a day, and rarely more than twice a week. Cream is never even seen; the cakes so dear to the provincial heart now appear stingily only at holidays. Even the ancient prerogatives of the male, his pet luxuries of smoking and drinking, are being enormously curtailed.

At the Schützenball last winter, a festival as epicurean as our Thanksgiving, in an assembly of five hundred guests, to say nothing of the Prince of Isenburg-Büdingen and his court, not a bottle of wine was opened; beer only was drunk, and not as much as was formerly sold in one Sunday afternoon at the Fürstenhof. The taverns themselves are deserted. You may find in one or another three or four old men and a chance traveler sitting in a chilly tap-room, under a dim light, for hours over a glass of beer. The town outside is black, lonely, cold, the stars ironically glittering down on the desolation of human stupidity.

At the Schützenfest last summer, a festival as explosive and picnicky as the Fourth of July, the innkeeper who had charge of catering at the great open pavilion up the valley a mile outside of town did not even bring wine. I sat at a long rustic table in

the afternoon and ordered coffee and cake. A thin, worn man and a haggard woman with three pale children came to the table. It was one of the tailors of Büdingen with his family. For an hour and a half they sat there without ordering either to eat or to drink; the man was not smoking. The children eyed the cake pathetically. I hesitated for nearly sixty minutes; provincial pride is easy to affront. But he accepted cake and coffee for his children after we came into conversation, and eventually I induced his wife to take coffee also. It required another half hour's conversation before I could casually have a glass of beer placed before him. The whole bill cost less than ten cents. And you should know that at the Schützenfest men and women splurged. It was a day set apart for spending, like a seaside outing or a bank holiday.

The celebrated German Christmas spirit is utterly gone. The presents are paltry, given and taken without much heart in the business; the atmosphere unfestive, almost gloomy. Dolls discarded, dolls broken, dolls from Heaven knows where, are unearthed for wholesale restoration in a barber's shop the week before. That was the sum of the visible Christmas spirit last year.

84

One other economic restriction may be mentioned here, perhaps the most dangerous of all. At a time when the new republic is creating facilities for advanced schooling on the part of girls, and even establishing continuation courses for young servant-girls, the general schooling of children is being cut short.

day,

The fly-wheel of German life toparticularly provincial, that throbs round day and night unceasingly and to which order and economy themselves are but subject gears, is work. Work and the quarter of an acre or more of tillable ground; work and a few other possessions which in a way that field of productive soil represents also: the geese waddling over the streets, the chickens clucking in the courtyards, the ducks paddling in the mill-stream, a few sheep, a few pigs. The capital of even the shopkeeper in the small town is to-day his own labor and that plot of land, in which enough can be grown to keep a family alive through a winter.

German industry functions purely in the character of the German worker. The German workman and the German provincial is not primarily docile, although the effect given by the forces which go to make up his character is one of docility. He simply, and by the mere nature of his being a German workman, is a worker. He wants to work. The desire, the need, the itch of activity is in his bones; he has to be busy; he has an innate knack for tinkering industriously, for applying himself patiently, for lasting back-breakingly. He learns to work as the green grass grows.

In all seasons there is human activity visible over the broad sides of the Monks' Woods or the Wild Stone hills, cut into tiny plots and patches, or down in the flat valley fields. Sometimes only that seemingly desultory pecking which is, however, the national gesture, as I have said, of tidying up: another quart of stones cleared out that another quart of beans may easier grow. Lovingly, those wee hillside squares are tended in

order to win the perfect diminutive harvest upon which each family must now bitterly depend to fill in the growing discrepancy between their maximum income and the minimum cost of living.

Early in the spring, early in the morning, out they go, whole families: the watchmaker's family, the baker's family, the dry-goods dealer's family, the grocer's family, the butcher's family, the policeman's family, the electrician's family-men, women, grandparents, children, and servants. At eight or half past they troop back, the men to their trades and their shopkeeping, the women to the kitchen, the grandparents to miscellaneous choring and shopping, the children to school, the servants to the bedrooms.

On the hillsides spring comes earlier than in the valley, but the snow is hardly melted before the morning and evening exodus takes place. Pin Pin neat as the houses are their gardens. They work, play, and court in them. The carpenter cut down a dying tree on his ground. His daughter and her bridegroom hovered about the patch an entire Sunday with a naïve, obvious watchfulness that no splinter be carried away, moving stiffly in Sunday best over the ground, clearing it the while, leaving it at night as smooth and clean as a quilt.

The region was once famous for vineyards, but the first fruit-trees brought diseases that fastened on the vines, and in time virtually killed them all off. Now it is famous for cherries, plums, apples, pears, peaches, and nuts. Most of the fruit belonging to the townspeople is preserved, just as much of the garden truck harvested is pickled. Up in tightly locked little out-of-the-way rooms the

banked rows of jugs, jars, pots, and glasses are the shrine of refuge and aid for the woman in the kitchen, and as long as she has them, she somehow has still a grip on things.

In the Germany of these things, the preserves in the up-stairs storeroom and the tilled field on the hillside or in the valley, the servant takes a principal part. The business of chief importance of the family has become the ordering of the home itself, and to the home is reckoned the garden field outside the town. The servants are almost without exception peasant girls, at home in the fields, born to work in the fields, versed in the devices of tilling, tending, and harvesting. They take more pride in the state of their mistress' truck gardens than in that of their kitchens. Although the men and children work in the garden also, and the mistress of the house wheels her baby out to it so that she may watch it while she helps twine together the bean-poles or weed the peas or prop the tomatoes or fuss around the cabbages or pick plums, it is upon the servant that the hardest work of the vegetable patch falls. They seldom balk at this work. At certain periods it means rising at five, going to sleep at ten or later, in order to finish the regular housework as well. Few American women can know what awful physical work a young woman can put through from five in the morning until the late supper dishes are washed and kitchen made spick and span again and it 's nine-thirty at night.

Yet the servant is better off to-day than the mistress, spiritually hounded by the furies of a situation which has prostrated many of the men. She may have to worry over the prepara

tion of the food, but neither over procuring it in the first place, nor over an unnatural economy in its consumption in the second. Food is the most valuable commodity in a bankrupt situation. She also receives clothes. In certain communities where every peasant girl, no matter how wealthy her parents, is compelled by tradition to go into service for two years prior to her marriage, the materials of her trousseau-peasant trousseau is extremely elaborate as well as the materials for her bright working and dress costumes, bedding, linens, and sundries must be furnished, also by an unwritten tradition as iron as law, by the mistress. Salary in these communities plays absolutely no rôle in the matter, and in some regions has hardly risen above pre-war figures. But the value of these materials has gone up to such an extent that in these districts middle-class women must do without servants. However, in towns like Büdingen, where servants are still plentifully retained, there are specific laws, already mentioned, insuring their proper medical attention in case of illness, against peremptory discharge, and legal protection and redress if need be. Their pay is being continually increased, schools are being opened providing for their further education, they enter service at sixteen, they have won the latch-key, Sunday afternoons off, and now and then a holiday furlough. Best of all, they have an intimate personal standing in the family, a warm, human share in its tribulations and joys, which makes of them personalities, human identities, entirely different from the typical English slavey or the usual American housemaid.

It will seem strange to many of us,

with whom the possession of a servant still savors somewhat of social distinction, that people as desperately pressed as these provincials of presentday Germany should still employ servants at all. But, as I have indicated, their wages are trivial. Labor is still the cheapest thing in Germany, almost criminally cheap, and where a trained nurse can be engaged for five cents a day, it may be expected that a servant-girl can be hired for a few paltry trillions of marks per month. Furthermore, their food consumption is alarming more in bulk than in value, consisting principally of potatoes, while the economic gain of their labor, upon which a good part of the family's food itself depends, fits so snugly in the housewife's program, frees her of so much dull labor which would completely rout her remaining energy, that the servant remains almost the most important and vital element in the household's efficiency.

One day last May I walked up the Monks' Woods hill. One progresses along zigzag inclines, for the hill is steep up all its thousand feet of height. Half-way to the top I paused for breath, and looked down on the little town, placed in position like neatly ordered models of Christmas toy houses. Sleepily, anciently beautiful lay the old town in the sunlight, its crumply colored town walls, gates, and castle soft in the eternal revivification of spring. I set my face to the stern slant of the path again, and as I turned a corner where the incline broke sharply up a new direction I saw an old woman ahead of me.

The picture of that old woman will remain with me as the symbol of a quality, an endurance, a tradition, an instinct of race preservation, of a

grim tough grit finer than battle heroism, yet pathetically less recognized and, I sometimes think, just as futile. The symbol of all provincial doggedness and humorlessness, and yet I had seen her kind dozens of times; others like her were undoubtedly toiling up different trails of the hill at that moment. It was only that something in the juxtaposition of that soft, colorful view of the town below and the picture of her a moment later created a passing responsiveness to impression that sticks.

She had across her shoulders and back a heavy yoke, from the ends of which were suspended two big iron buckets on chains about which her arms twined. The buckets were about three times the size of our ordinary scrub-buckets. They were filled almost to the brim with the dark, greenish fertilizing liquid from a stable in the town. Up to her little field she was lugging that dead weight, carefully would she sprinkle it over the thirsty ground, and to-morrow trudge up with two other buckets.

The foundations of the beautiful

wee town in its rose-colored wall rested on that old woman's shoulders. Beyond it, across that blue-hazed rolling plain and behind those distant, faint hills, on one of which the old castle of the Ronneburg proudly reared the arrogant shell of its ruin, lay Frankfort, a great city. And the city of Frankfort rested on that old woman's shoulders. And over there, behind the dark pine-crowned ridge of the Tiergarten and the Hunter's Valley, and far beyond, lay Berlin. And the great city of Berlin lay on that old woman's woman's shoulders. And all the proud cities of Germany-Munich and Leipsic, Hamburg and Bremen-all of them lay on that old woman's shoulders.

For she was the provincial, tough, enduring. Unable to cry quits, unable to stop her sons rushing after drums, unable to stop her tears when they failed to follow the drums back, unable, until her legs utterly failed her, to stop toiling up the thousand feet of stiff hillside with two buckets of waste to fertilize a thirsty field the better to make the restive sons of her dead sons grow.