arrives in the garden when
your meal is served, asks if you have all you want, wishes you _guten
Appetit_, and after a little further conversation waddles away to
perform the same office at some other table. Except in the depths of
the country where the inn-keepers are peasants, a German hotel-keeper
invariably speaks several languages, and has usually been in Paris and
London or New York. His business is to deal with the guests and the
waiters, and to look after the cellar and the cigars; while his wife
or his sister, though she keeps more in the background than a French
proprietress, does just as much work as a Frenchwoman, and, as far as
one can judge, more than any man in the establishment. She
superintends the chambermaids and has entire care of the vast stock of
linen; in many cases she has most of it washed on the premises, and
she helps to iron and repair it. She buys the provisions, and sees
that there is neither waste nor disorder in the kitchen; she often
does a great part of the actual cooking herself. When I was a girl I
happened to spend a winter in a South German hotel of old standing,
kept for several generations in the same family, and now managed by
two brothers and a sister. The sister, a well-educated young woman of
twenty-five, used to get up at five winter and summer to buy what was
wanted for the market, and one day she took me with her. It was a
pretty lesson in the art of housekeeping as it is understood and
practised in Germany. All the peasant women in the duchy could not
have persuaded my young woman to have given the fraction of a farthing
more for her vegetables than they were worth that day, or to take any
geese except the youngest and plumpest. She went briskly from one part
of the market to the other, seeming to see at a glance where it was
profitable to deal this morning. She did not haggle or squabble as
inferior housewives will, because she knew just what she wanted and
what it was prudent to pay for it. When she got home she sat down to a
second breakfast that seemed to me like a dinner, a stew of venison
and half a bottle of light wine; but, as she said, hotel keeping is
exhausting work, and hotel-keepers must needs live well.

At some hotels in this part of Germany wine is included in the charge
for dinner, and given to each guest in a glass carafe or uncorked
bottle. It is kept on tap even in the small wayside inns, where you
get half a litre for two or three pence when you are ou