for saleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and ubiquitous pickles,—­all those things have he, and his fathers before him, eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial.  He will listen incredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change of fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c.; for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he may be too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and his wife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while ours must lie down and rest by noon.  In spite of all this, he will do what he can to humor our whims.  Never yet have we seen the country boarding-house where kindly and persistent remonstrance would not introduce the gridiron and banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt at yeast-bread.  Good, patient, long-suffering country people!  The only wonder to us is that they tolerate so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, the preferences and prejudices of city men and women, who come and who remain strangers among them; and who, in so many instances, behave from first to last as if they were of a different race, and knew nothing of any common bonds of humanity and Christianity.

The Good Staff of Pleasure.

In an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined every day for three weeks, one summer, I made the acquaintance of a little maid called Gretchen.  She stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark passageway which communicated in some mysterious fashion with cellar, kitchen, dining-room, and main hall of the inn.  From one or other of these quarters Gretchen was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know how she contrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate in the course of the day.  Poor child!  I am afraid she did most of her work after dark; for I sometimes left her standing there at ten o’clock at night.  She was blanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sunlight.  I doubt if ever, unless perhaps on some exceptional Sunday, she knew the sensation of a full breath of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face.

But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there was never-failing good-cheer in her voice when she said “Good-morning.”  Her uniform atmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, I said to Franz, the head waiter,—­

“What makes Gretchen so happy?  She has a hard life, always standing in that narrow dark place, washing dishes.”

Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English.  He shrugged his shoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen’s life was a hard one, and added,—­

“Ja, ja.  She likes because all must come at her door.  There will be no one which will say not nothing if they go by.”

That was it.  Almost every hour some human voice said pleasantly to her, “Good-morning, Gretchen,” or “It is a fine day;” or, if no word were spoken, there would be a friendly nod and smile.  For nowhere in kind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pass by other human beings, as we do in America, without so much as a turn of the head to show recognition of humanity in common.