cow, and for a time you take a slice day after day without
complaining. It is the persistence of the thing that wears you out in
the end. You must be born to _Ochsenfleisch_ to eat it year in and
year out as if it was bread or potatoes. It does not appear as
regularly in North as in South Germany; and in Hamburg you may once in
a way have dinner without soup. People who know Germany find this
almost beyond belief, but Hamburg has many little ways of its own, and
is a city with a strong individual character. It is extremely proud of
its cooking and its food, and it has every right to be. I once
travelled with two Germans who in a heated way discussed the
comparative merits of various German cities. They could not agree, and
they could not let the matter drop. At last one man got the best of
it. "I tell you that Hamburg is the finest city in Germany," he said.
"In a Hamburg hotel I once ate the best steak I ever ate in my life."
The other man had nothing to say to that. Hamburg has a splendid fish
supply, and Holstein brings her quantities of fruit and of farm
produce. Your second breakfast there is like a French dejeuner, a meal
served and prepared according to your means, but a regular meal and
not a mere snack. You drink coffee after it, and so sustain life till
five o'clock, when you dine. Then you drink coffee again, and as your
dinner has probably been an uncommonly good one you only need a light
supper at nine o'clock, when a tray will arrive with little sandwiches
and slender bottles of beer. In North Germany, where wine is scarce
and dear, it is hardly ever seen in many households, so that a young
Englishman wanting to describe his German friends, divided them for
convenience into wine people and beer people. The wine people were
plutocrats, and had red or white Rhine wine every day for dinner. I
probably need not tell my well-informed country people that Germans
never speak of hock.

In households where the chief meal of the day is at one or two o'clock
there is afternoon tea or coffee. It used invariably to be coffee,
good hot coffee and fresh rusks and dainty little _Hoernchen_ and
_Radankuchen_, an excellent light cake baked in a twisty tin. German
cakes want a whole chapter to themselves to do them justice, and they
should have it if it were not for a dialogue that frequently takes
place in a family well known to me. The wife is of German origin, but
as she has an English husband and English servants she ke