ial. "Off with his head!" "But I
meant the Emperor of China," protested the sinner. "That's
impossible," said the officials in chorus. "Anyone who says the
Emperor is a fool means our Emperor." And an official spirit seems to
encroach on the business one, and drill its very customers while it
anxiously serves them. For instance, the arrangements for sending what
you buy are most tiresome and difficult to understand at Wertheim's.
His carts patrol the streets, and your German friends assure you that
he sends anything. You find that if you shop with a country card the
things entered on it will arrive; but if you buy a bulky toy or some
heavy books and pay for them in their departments, you meet with fuss
and refusal when you ask as a matter of course to have them sent. It
can be done if your goods have cost enough, but not if you have only
spent two or three shillings. It is the fashion in England just now
for every man who writes about Germans to say that they are immensely
ahead of us in business matters. I cannot judge of them in their
factories and warehouses, but I am sure they are behind us in their
shops. A woman cannot live three hundred miles from Berlin and get
everything she wants from Wertheim delivered by return and carriage
free. Nor will he supply her with an immense illustrated catalogue and
a book of order forms addressed to his firm, so that the trouble of
shopping from a distance is reduced to a minimum. In England you can
do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch
or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb.

In most German towns you still find the shops classified on the old
lines. You go to one for drapery, and to another for linen, and to
another for small wares, and to yet another for ribbons. There are
sausage shops and chocolate shops, and in Berlin there are shops for
the celebrated Berlin _Baumkuchen_. There are a great many cellar
shops all over Germany, and these are mostly restaurants, laundries,
and greengrocers. The drinking scene in _Faust_ when Mephisto made
wine flow from the table takes place in Auerbach's Keller, a cellar
restaurant still in existence in Leipzig. The lower class of cellar
takes the place in Germany of our slums, and the worst of them are
regular thieves' kitchens known to the police. There is an admirable
description of life in a cellar shop in Klara Viebig's _Das Taegliche
Brot_. The woman who keeps it has a greengrocery business