y were not so well served by the waiting-maids as the
American company and their guests. One, however, stated the unimportant
incident, that the coat of the man who handled him so carelessly seemed
to be very wet. One of the Americans who had been present on this
occasion did not present himself until sent for several days afterwards.
He had observed an incident seen by no other,--one of which the
performer, himself as honest a young man as ever lived, was utterly
unconscious,--_the pouring of a glass of beer from the window_. The beer
did as little harm on the cuirassiers' coats as it would have done in
the American's stomach, and was at least the incidental means of
bringing the whole scene to an abrupt end. The government was inclined
to do us justice, but very naturally thought that the drenching of its
cuirassiers might be pleaded in abatement of the insult to our national
dignity; and so a nominal punishment of the offenders finally settled
the question.

If asked whether inebriation and its accompaniments are as marked under
the reign of beer as under that of the more fiery fluids used among us,
I should feel bound to reply negatively. The common Bavarian beer has
but about half the strength of the average malt liquors of our country,
and seldom produces real intoxication except upon novices. It may
stupefy, though this is by no means observable in the mental action of
learned Bavarians. The charge of dulness, so sarcastically made against
them, could be retorted with about as much show of reason against
Prussians, Hanoverians, Saxons, or, indeed, any other people. The
students, after their _Kneips_, have what they call
_Katzenjammer_,--cat-sickness,--the effect of debauch, loss of rest, and
general irregularities; and those who do most of the beer-drinking do
least of the studying. I should, indeed, fear fatal effects from
drinking half the quantity of water which some of them take of beer. The
drunkenness produced by beer is at least a very different thing from
that produced by distilled spirits. The one may be a stupor, the other
is a brief and sudden insanity. Beer holds no one captive by such spell
as that which seizes some natures on the first taste of ardent spirits,
throwing them beyond their own control until their week's frolic is
ended. The cases are rare, if they ever occur, in which the beer-drinker
is enticed from the prosecution of his business, if he has one,--and
beer furnishes the main substitut