water. We let you our
rooms, but we did not let you our coal. It is quite simple. Have you
any other complaint to make?"

We had, but we did not make them. We went to one of the big cities,
where the civilian is still a worm, but where he has a large number
and variety of other worms to keep him company. In Berlin or Hamburg
or Leipzig there are always furnished rooms delighted to receive you.
There may be a difficulty, however, if you are a musician. The police
come in with their regulations; or your fellow-lodgers may be students
of medicine or philosophy, and driven wild by your harmonies. I knew a
young musician who always took rooms in the noisiest street in Berlin,
and practised with his windows open. He said the din of electric
trams, overhead trains, motor cars, and heavy lorries helped his
landlady and her family to suffer a Beethoven sonata quite gladly.

One of the insoluble mysteries of German life is the cheapness of
furnished lodgings as compared with the high rent and rates. To be
sure, the landlady does not cook for you, and the bed-sitting-room is
not considered sordid in Germany. In fact, the separate sitting-room
is almost unknown, though it is easy to arrange one by shifting some
furniture. The pattern of the room and its appointments hardly vary in
any part of Germany, though of course the size and quality vary with
the price. If you take a small room you have one straight window, and
if you take a large one you have several. Or you may have a broad
balcony window opening on to a balcony. You have the parqueted or
painted floor, the porcelain stove, the sofa, the table, the wooden
bedstead, and the wooden hanging cupboard wherever you are. It is
always sensible, comfortable furniture, and usually plain. When people
over there know no better they buy themselves tawdry horrors, just as
they do here. The German manufacturers flood the world with such
things. But people who let lodgings put their treasures in a sacred
room they call _das beste Zimmer_, and only use on festive occasions.
They fob you off with old-fashioned stuff they do not value, a roomy
solid cupboard, a family sofa, a chest of drawers black with age, and
a hanging mirror framed in old elm-wood; and if it were not for a
bright green rep tablecloth, snuff-coloured curtains, and a wall paper
with a brown background and yellow snakes on it, you would like your
quarters very well indeed. Rooms are usually let by the month, except
in wat