perhaps just then less than usual of that or any other language.  The supposition was, that the rough treatment grew out of the cuirassiers’ jealousy that they were not so well served by the waiting-maids as the American company and their guests.  One, however, stated the unimportant incident, that the coat of the man who handled him so carelessly seemed to be very wet.  One of the Americans who had been present on this occasion did not present himself until sent for several days afterwards.  He had observed an incident seen by no other,—­one of which the performer, himself as honest a young man as ever lived, was utterly unconscious,—­the pouring of a glass of beer from the window.  The beer did as little harm on the cuirassiers’ coats as it would have done in the American’s stomach, and was at least the incidental means of bringing the whole scene to an abrupt end.  The government was inclined to do us justice, but very naturally thought that the drenching of its cuirassiers might be pleaded in abatement of the insult to our national dignity; and so a nominal punishment of the offenders finally settled the question.

If asked whether inebriation and its accompaniments are as marked under the reign of beer as under that of the more fiery fluids used among us, I should feel bound to reply negatively.  The common Bavarian beer has but about half the strength of the average malt liquors of our country, and seldom produces real intoxication except upon novices.  It may stupefy, though this is by no means observable in the mental action of learned Bavarians.  The charge of dulness, so sarcastically made against them, could be retorted with about as much show of reason against Prussians, Hanoverians, Saxons, or, indeed, any other people.  The students, after their Kneips, have what they call Katzenjammer,—­cat-sickness,—­the effect of debauch, loss of rest, and general irregularities; and those who do most of the beer-drinking do least of the studying.  I should, indeed, fear fatal effects from drinking half the quantity of water which some of them take of beer.  The drunkenness produced by beer is at least a very different thing from that produced by distilled spirits.  The one may be a stupor, the other is a brief and sudden insanity.  Beer holds no one captive by such spell as that which seizes some natures on the first taste of ardent spirits, throwing them beyond their own control until their week’s frolic is ended.  The cases are rare, if they ever occur, in which the beer-drinker is enticed from the prosecution of his business, if he has one,—­and beer furnishes the main substitute for business to those who have no other employment.  If it causes men to pursue their avocations lazily or stupidly, it does not cause the irregularities and neglects of American inebriation.  Cases of pawning clothes and impoverishing families from the appetite for beer may occur, just as from laziness, but not as from the bewitching appetite for ardent spirits.