l made chairs and
cupboards. Here the mistress of the house kept her palms, her
work-table, and her pet birds. Here her husband smoked his
after-dinner cigar and drank his coffee before going to his work
again. Here the elder children did their lessons for next day's
school, and here at night the family sat round one lamp,--the father
smoking, the mother probably mending, the children playing games. For
German fathers do not live at the _Kneipe_. They are occasionally to
be found with their families. When the flat was not large enough to
furnish a third sitting-room, the dining-room was used in this way. A
modern German family still lives in any room rather than the
drawing-room, but it has learned how to make a drawing-room
attractive. The odious "suite" has been abolished or dispersed, and a
lighter, less formal scheme of decoration is making its way. You see
charming rooms in Germany nowadays, but they are never quite like
English ones, even when your friends point to a wicker chair or an
Eastern carpet and tell you that they love everything English and have
furnished in the English fashion. In the first place, you do not see
piles of magazines and papers or of library books in a German
drawing-room. They would be considered scandalously untidy, and put
away in a cupboard at once. If there are cut flowers they are not
arranged as they are here. On ceremonial occasions and anniversaries
great quantities of flowers are presented, but they are mostly wired
and probably arranged in a fanciful shape. The favourite shape changes
with the season and the fashion of the moment. One year those who wish
to honour you and have plenty of money, will send you lyres and harps
made of violets, pansies, pinks, cornflowers, any flower that will
lend itself meekly to popular design. The favourite design in Berlin
one spring was a large flat sofa cushion of Guelder roses with tall
sprays of roses or carnations dancing from it. On ordinary occasions
market bunches are put into water as an English cottager puts in his
flowers, level and tightly packed. But on a festive occasion in a rich
man's house you hear of a long dinner table strewn with branches of
pink hawthorn and peonies. In fact, a riot of flowers is now
considered correct by wealthy people, but you do not find them here
and there and everywhere, whether people are wealthy or not, as you do
in England. That is partly because there are so few private gardens.

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