e librettists of pre-Wagnerian days went for
their stage effects. All the characters of many a German opera are
there correctly dressed, joining in the songs and dances, shooting for
wagers, making love, sometimes coming to blows. But you may look on at
a _Kirchweih_ from morning till night without seeing either horseplay
or drunkenness. Not that the German peasant is an opera hero in his
inner life. He is a hard-working man, God-fearing on the whole, stupid
and stolid often, narrowly shrewd often, having his eye on the main
chance. When he is stupid but not God-fearing he dresses himself and
his wife in their best clothes, puts his insurance papers in his
pockets, sets his thatched house on fire, and goes for a walk. Then he
is surprised that he is caught and punished. Fires are frequent in
German villages, and in a high wind and where the roofs are of straw
destruction is complete sometimes. You often come across the blackened
remains of houses, and you always feel anxious about the new
buildings that will replace them. It is a good deal to say, but I
believe our own jerry-builders are outdone in florid vulgarity by
German villadom, and the German atrocities will last longer than ours,
because the building laws are more stringent. But the old _Bauernhaus_
still to be seen in most parts of the Black Forest is dignified and
beautiful. The Swiss chalet is a poor gim-crack thing in comparison.
Sometimes the German house has a shingled roof, and sometimes a
thatched roof dark with age, and it has drooping eaves and an outside
staircase and balcony of wood. It shelters the farm cattle in the
stables on the ground floor, and the family on the upper floor, and in
the roof there are granaries. But the beautiful old thatched roofs are
gradually giving place to the slate ones, because they burn so easily,
and fire, when it comes, is the village tragedy. I can remember when a
fire in a big German commercial town was proclaimed by a beating drum,
the noisy parade of fire-men, the clanging of bells, and all the
hullaballoo that panic and curiosity could make. But last year, in
Berlin, looking at houses like the tower of Babel, I said something of
fire, and was told that no one felt nervous nowadays, the arrangements
for dealing with it were so complete.

"People just look out of the window, see that there is a fire next
door, or above or beneath them, and go about their business," said my
hosts. "They know that the fire brigade wil