women gossip at the well,
you have made friends with Leegart the seamstress, who believes that
quite against her will she is gifted with supernatural powers. There
is Haespele, too, who made Joseph his new boots, and would marry
Martina if he could; and there is David, the father of Martina, who
was hardly kept from murdering his daughter when she came home in
disgrace, and whose grandson becomes the apple of his eye. The whole
picture of these people is vivid and enchanting, touched with quaint
detail, veined with the tragedy of their lives, glowing with the warm
human qualities that knit them to each other. The South German loves
to tell you that his country is _ein gesegnetes Land_, a blessed
country, flowing with milk and honey; and whether you are reading
Auerbach's peasant stories or actually staying amongst his peasant
folk, you get this impression of their natural surroundings. Nature is
kind here, grows forest for her people on the hill-tops, and wine,
fruit and corn in her sheltered valleys, ripens their fruit in summer,
gives them heavy crops of hay, and sends soft warm rain as well as sun
to enrich their pastures.

In the eastern provinces of Germany the conditions of life amongst the
poor are most unhappy. Here the land belongs to large proprietors, and
until modern times the people born on the land belonged to the
landlords too. No man could leave the village where he was born
without permission, and he had to work for his masters without pay.
Even in the memory of living men the whip was quite commonly used. In
her most interesting account of a Silesian village,[3] Gertrud
Dyhrenfurth says that the present condition of the peasantry in this
region compares favourably with former times, but she admits that they
are still miserably overworked and underpaid. They are no longer
legally obliged to submit to corporal punishment, nor can they be
forced to live where they were born, and as they emigrate in large
numbers, scarcity of labour has brought about slightly improved
conditions for those remaining. But a man's wage is still a mark a day
in summer and 90 pf. in winter. A woman earns 60 pf. in summer and 50
pf. in winter. Besides receiving these wages, a family regularly
employed lives rent free and gets a fixed amount of coal, and at
harvest time some corn and brandy. You cannot say the family has a
house or cottage to itself, because the system is to build long
bare-looking barracks in which numbers of w