and a
registry office for servants, and as such people go is respectable;
but I recommend the book to my countrymen who go to Berlin as
officials or journalists for ten days, are taken over various highly
polished public institutions, and come back to tell us that the
Germans are every man jack of them clean, prosperous, well mannered,
and healthy. It is true that German municipal government is striving
rather splendidly to bring this state of things about, but they have
plenty of work before them still. These cellar shops, for instance,
are more fit for mushroom growing than for human nurseries, and yet
the picture in the novel of the family struggling with darkness and
disease there can still be verified in most of the old streets of
Germany.

When our English journalists write column after column about the
dangerous explosive energy and restlessness of modern Germany, I feel
sure that they must be right, and yet I wish they could have come
shopping with me a year or two ago in a small Black Forest town. One
of us wanted a watch key and the other a piece of tape, and we set off
light-heartedly to buy them, for we knew that there was a draper and a
watchmaker in the main street. We knew, too, that in South Germany
everyone is first dining and then asleep between twelve and two, so we
waited till after two and then went to the watchmaker's. There was no
shop window, and when, after ringing two or three times, we were let
in we found there was no shop. We sat down in a big cool sitting-room,
beautifully clean and tidy. The watchmaker's wife appeared in due
course, looked at us with friendly interest, asked us where we came
from, and how long we meant to stay, wondered if we knew her cousin
Johannes Mueller, a hairdresser in Islington, discussed the relative
merits of emigration to England and America, offered us some cherries
from a basketful on the table, and at last admitted unwillingly that
her husband was not at home, and that she herself knew not whether he
had watch keys. So we set off to buy our tape, and again found a
private room, an amiable family, but no one who felt able to sell
anything. It seemed an odd way of doing business we said to our
landlord, but he saw nothing odd in it. Most people were busy with
their hay, he explained. Towards the end of a week we caught our
watchmaker, and obtained a key, but he would not let us pay for it. He
said it was one of an old collection, and of no use to him. The
eti