carriages. In fact, the German does not make
as much of animals as the Englishman does. If he lives in the country,
or if he means to be a man of fashion, he will have dogs and horses,
but he will not have one or both, by hook or by crook, whether he is
rich or poor, as the Briton does. You see dogs in any German city that
remind you of a paragraph that once appeared in an Italian paper, a
paragraph about a case of dog stealing. The dog was produced in court,
said the paper, and was either a fox terrier or a Newfoundland. But
you often see a fine Dachs; in Heidelberg the students are proud of
their great boar-hounds, and in the Black Forest there are numbers of
little black Pomeranians.

In German towns where there is water, the traffic on it both for
business and amusement is as busy as with us, and in some respects
better managed. Hamburg life, for instance, is largely on the basin of
the Alster; either in the little steamers that carry you from city to
suburb, or in the small craft that crowd its waters on a summer night.
It is as usual in Hamburg as on the Thames to own boats and understand
their management, and there are the same varieties to be seen there:
the pleasure boats with people of all ages, the racing outrigger full
of strenuous, lightly clad young men, and the little sail boats
scurrying across the water before the breeze. On the Rhine the big
steamers do a roaring traffic all the summer, and catch the public
that likes a good dinner with their scenery; and on the Rhine, as well
as on most of the other rivers of Germany, there are a great many
swimming baths; for every German who has a chance learns to swim. In
Hamburg on a summer evening you meet troops of little boys and girls
going to the baths, many of them belonging to the poorer classes; for
where there are no swimming baths attached to the school they get
tickets free or at a very low rate. About fishing I can only speak
from hearsay, for I have never caught a minnow myself, but I have met
Germans who are keen anglers, and I have found that they knew every
London shop beloved of anglers, and the English name of every fly.

Germans get more amusement out of their water-ways in winter than we
do, for the winters there are long and hard, so that there is always
skating. I have seen the Alster frozen for weeks, and the whole city
of Hamburg playing on the ice. It was not what we call good ice, and
not what we call good skating. For the most part peop