ering-places, where weekly prices prevail. In Leipzig you can
get a room for 10s. a month. It will be a parterre or a fourth-floor
room, rather gloomy and rather shabby, but a possible room for a
student who happens to be hard up. For L1 a month you can get a room
on a higher floor, and better furnished, while for L1, 10s. a month in
Hamburg I myself have had two well-furnished rooms commanding a fine
view of the Alster, and one of them so large that in winter it was
nearly impossible to keep warm. Then my Hamburg friends told me I was
paying too much, and that they could have got better lodgings for less
money. They were nearer the sky than I should like in these days, but
the old German system of letting the higher flats in a good house for
a low rent benefits people who care about a "select" neighbourhood and
yet cannot pay very much. The modern system of lifts will gradually
make it impossible to get a flat or lodgings in a good street without
paying as much for the fifth floors as for the first.

You do not see much of a German landlady, as she does not cater for
you. She is often a widow, and when you know the rent of a flat you
wonder how she squeezes a living out of what her lodgers pay her. She
cannot even nourish herself with their scraps, or warm herself at a
kitchen fire for which they pay. Some of them perform prodigies of
thrift, especially when they have children to feed and educate. At the
end of a long severe winter, when the Alster had been frozen for
months, I found out by chance that my landlady, a sad aged widow with
one little boy, had never lighted herself a fire. She let every room
of her large flat, except a kitchen and a _Kammer_ opening out of it.
The little food she needed she cooked on an oil stove, at night she
had a lamp, and of course she never by any chance opened a window. She
said she could not afford coals, and that her son and she managed to
keep warm. The miracle is that they both kept alive and well. Another
German landlady was of a different type, a big buxom bustling
creature, who spent most of the day in her husband's coal sheds,
helping him with his books and taking orders. Although she was so busy
she undertook to cook for me, and kept her promise honourably; and she
cooked for herself, her husband, and their work-people. She used
sometimes to show me the huge dishes of food they were about to
consume, food that was cheap to buy and nourishing to eat, but
troublesome to prepar