muslin cap. In
many districts no medical advice would induce the rustic to renounce the
tight leather belt with which he injures his digestive functions; you
could more easily persuade him to smile on a new communal system than on
the unhistorical invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in
spite of the philanthropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for years
threw his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he could be persuaded
to put them on his own table. However, the unwillingness of the peasant
to adopt innovations has a not unreasonable foundation in the fact that
for him experiments are practical, not theoretical, and must be made with
expense of money instead of brains--a fact that is not, perhaps,
sufficiently taken into account by agricultural theorists, who complain
of the farmer's obstinacy. The peasant has the smallest possible faith
in theoretic knowledge; he thinks it rather dangerous than otherwise, as
is well indicated by a Lower Rhenish proverb--"One is never too old to
learn, said an old woman; so she learned to be a witch."

Between many villages an historical feud, once perhaps the occasion of
much bloodshed, is still kept up under the milder form of an occasional
round of cudgelling and the launching of traditional nicknames. An
historical feud of this kind still exists, for example, among many
villages on the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood.
_Rheinschnacke_ (of which the equivalent is perhaps "water-snake") is the
standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who
repays it in kind by the epithet "karst" (mattock), or "kukuk" (cuckoo),
according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or
the forest. If any Romeo among the "mattocks" were to marry a Juliet
among the "water-snakes," there would be no lack of Tybalts and Mercutios
to carry the conflict from words to blows, though neither side knows a
reason for the enmity.

A droll instance of peasant conservatism is told of a village on the
Taunus, whose inhabitants, from time immemorial, had been famous for
impromptu cudgelling. For this historical offence the magistrates of the
district had always inflicted the equally historical punishment of
shutting up the most incorrigible offenders, not in prison, but in their
own pig-sty. In recent times, however, the government, wishing to
correct the rudeness of these peasants, appointed an "enlightened" man as
a magistrate, who