to obtain relief for the
peasants from some of their many oppressions; but of an effort on their
part to step out of their hereditary rank and calling, to become gentry,
to leave the plough and carry on the easier business of capitalists or
government functionaries, there is no example.

The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant-life fall
into the same mistake as our English novelists: they transfer their own
feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and
sorrows of which they know nothing. The peasant never questions the
obligation of family ties--he questions _no custom_--but tender
affection, as it exists among the refined part of mankind, is almost as
foreign to him as white hands and filbert-shaped nails. That the aged
father who has given up his property to his children on condition of
their maintaining him for the remainder of his life, is very far from
meeting with delicate attentions, is indicated by the proverb current
among the peasantry--"Don't take your clothes off before you go to bed."
Among rustic moral tales and parables, not one is more universal than the
story of the ungrateful children, who made their gray-headed father,
dependent on them for a maintenance, eat at a wooden trough became he
shook the food out of his trembling hands. Then these same ungrateful
children observed one day that their own little boy was making a tiny
wooden trough; and when they asked him what it was for, he answered--that
his father and mother might eat out of it, when he was a man and had to
keep them.

Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the peasants who
have the largest share of property. Politic marriages are as common
among them as among princes; and when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia
marries, her husband adopts her name, and places his own after it with
the prefix _geborner_ (_nee_). The girls marry young, and the rapidity
with which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs that the
early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than of conjugal
tenderness. "When our writers of village stories," says Riehl,
"transferred their own emotional life to the peasant, they obliterated
what is precisely his most predominant characteristic, namely, that with
him general custom holds the place of individual feeling."

We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by nervous diseases
of which the peasant knows nothing. To him headache is t