g Bavarian from Nuremberg, who never
fails to grieve over the thin beer of Hamburg, and who, as member of a
choral union near Das Johanneum, delights in vigorous and unexpected
bursts of song; and myself.

Workmen in Hamburg are still in a state of villanage; beneath the roof of
the "Herr" do they find at once a workshop, a dormitory, and a home. We
endeavour so far to conform to the rules of propriety as to escape the
imprisonment and other penalties that await the "unruly journeyman." The
table of Herr Sorgenpfennig is our own, and a very liberal one it is
esteemed to be. Let me sketch you a few of its items: delicious coffee,
"white bread and brown," or rather black, and unlimited butter, make up
our breakfast. Dinner always commences with a soup, usually made from
meat, sometimes from herbs, lemon, sweet fruit, or other ingredients
utterly indescribable. Meat, to be fit for a German table, must be
carefully pared of every vestige of fat; if boiled it is underdone,
unless expressly devoted to the soup, when the juiceless shreds that
remain are served up with plums or prepared vegetables; if it be baked
(roasting is almost unknown) it is dry and tasteless. Bacon and
sausages, with their inevitable accompaniment, sourkraut, is a favourite
dish; but not so unvaryingly so as some choose to imagine. Acids
generally are much admired in German cookery. In nothing, perhaps, are
the Hamburgers more to be envied, in a gastronomic view, than in their
vegetables. Singularly small as are these products of the kitchen
garden, they are sweeter and more delicately flavoured than any I ever
tasted elsewhere. As _entremets_, and as accompaniments to meat, they
are largely consumed. The Hamburgers laugh at the English cooks who boil
green peas and potatoes in plain water, for here boiled potatoes are
scarcely known--that nutritious vegetable being cut into slices and
fried; while green peas are slowly stewed in butter or cream, and
sweetened with fine sugar. But we "gesellen" have plebeian appetites,
and whatever dish may be set before us, as surely vanishes to its latest
shred. The little patches of puff-paste, smeared with preserve, sent to
us as Sunday treat, or the curious production in imitation of our English
pie, and filled with maccaroni, are immolated at once without misgiving
or remorse. If we sup at all, it is upon pasty, German cheese, full of
holes, as if it had been made in water, or a hot liver sausage, as a