beer or
wine, but they are never given tea. Except for the scarcity of butter
in middle-class households, they live very well.

They go out on errands and to market a great deal, but they do not go
out as much for themselves as our servants do. A few hours every other
Sunday still contents them in most places. Their favourite amusement
is the cheap public ball, and the careful German householder is
actually in the habit of trusting the key of the flat to his
maid-of-all-work, and allowing her to return at any hour of the night
she pleases. This at any rate is the custom in Berlin and some other
large German towns, and the evil results of such a system are
manifold. Over and over again burglaries have been traced to it. One
beguiling man engages your maid to dance and sup with him, while his
confederate gets hold of her key and comfortably rifles your rooms. On
the girls themselves these entertainments are said to have the worst
possible influence, and most sensible Germans would put a stop to them
if they could.

You must not expect in Germany to have hot water brought to you at
regular intervals as you do in every orderly English household. The
Germans have a curious notion that English life is quite uniform, and
all English people exactly alike. One man, a notably wise man too,
said to me that if he knew one English family he knew ten thousand.
Another German told me that this account of German life would be
impossible to write, because one part of Germany differed from the
other part; but that a German could easily write the same kind of book
about England, because from Land's End to John o' Groats we were so
many peas in a pod. To us who live in England and know the differences
between the Cornish and the Yorkshire people, for instance, or the
Welsh and the East Anglians, this seems sheer nonsense. I have tried
to understand how Germans arrive at it, and I believe it is by way of
our cans of hot water brought at regular intervals every day in the
year in every British household. I remember that their machine-like
precision impressed M. Taine when he was in England, and certainly
miss them sadly while we are abroad. Gretchen brings you no hot water
unless you ask for it; but she will brush your clothes as a matter of
course, though she does all the work of the household. She will,
however, be hurt and surprised if you do not press a small coin into
her hand at the end of each week, and one or two big ones at partin