ry and
music, gabled, tumbledown houses, storks' nests, toys, marvellous
cakes and sweets and the kindliest of people. If you are so modern
that German means nothing to you but drill and hustle, the roar of
factories and the pride of monster municipal ventures, then you may
see the markets of Berlin and rest content with them. They will show
you what you already know of this day's Germany. But my household
treasures gathered here and there in German markets did not have one
added to their number in Berlin.

"That!" said a German friend when I showed her a yellow pitcher dabbed
with colour, and having a spout, a handle, and a lid,--"that! I would
not have it in my kitchen."

It certainly only cost the third of a penny, but it lived with honour
in my drawing-room till it shared the fate of all clay, and came in
two in somebody's hands. The blue and grey bellied bottle, one of
those in which the Thuringian peasants carry beer to the field, cost
three halfpence, but the butter-dish with a lid of the same ware only
cost a halfpenny. There is always an immense heap of this rough grey
and blue pottery in a South German market, and it is much prettier
than the more ornate Coblenz ware we import and sell at high prices.
So is the deep red earthenware glazed inside and rough outside and
splashed with colours. You find plenty of it at the Leipziger Messe,
that historical fair that used to be as important to Western Europe as
Nijni Novgorod is to Russia and the East. To judge from modern German
trade circulars, it is still of considerable importance, and the
buildings in which merchants of all countries display their wares have
recently been renovated and enlarged. Out of doors the various
market-places are covered with little stalls selling cheap clothing,
cheap toys, jewellery, sweets, and gingerbread; all the heterogeneous
rubbish you have seen a thousand times at German fairs, and never
tire of seeing if a fair delights you.

But better than the Leipziger Messe, better even than a summer market
at Freiburg or at Heidelburg, is a Christmas market in any one of the
old German cities in the hill country, when the streets and the open
places are covered with crisp clean snow, and the mountains are white
with it, and the moon shines on the ancient houses, and the tinkle of
sledge bells reaches you when you escape from the din of the market,
and look down at the bustle of it from some silent place, a high
window perhaps, or the h