ix
pretzels for ten pfennigs. A five-pfennig tip for Frau Dickleibig, and
she brings you the _Fliegende Blaetter_, _Le Rire_, the Munich or Berlin
papers, whatever you want. A drowsy, hedonistic, easy-going place. Not
much talk, not much rattling of crockery, not much card playing. The
mountain, one guesses, of Munich meditation. The incubator of Munich
_gemuetlichkeit_.

Upstairs there is the big Mathaeser hall, with room for three thousand
visitors of an evening, a great resort for Bavarian high privates and
their best girls, the scene of honest and public courting. Between the
Bavarian high private and the Bavarian lieutenant all the differences
are in favour of the former. He wears no corsets, he is innocent of the
monocle, he sticks to native beer. A man of amour like his officer, he
disdains the elaborate winks, the complex _diableries_ of that superior
being, and confines himself to open hugging. One sees him, in these
great beer halls, with his arm around his Lizzie. Anon he arouses
himself from his coma of love to offer her a sip from his _mass_ or to
whisper some bovine nothing into her ear. Before they depart for the
evening he escorts her to the huge sign, "_Fuer Damen_," and waits
patiently while she goes in and fixes her mussed hair.

The Bavarians have no false pruderies, no nasty little nicenesses.
There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more
clean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale
in every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain for
the studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swiss
towns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday school
superintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stinging
deviltry, a swift massacre of all the commandments, but a liquid and
tolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps,
but at any rate it mellows. No Muenchener ever threw a stone.

And so, passing swiftly over the Burgerbraeu in the Kaufingerstrasse,
the Hackerbraeu, the Kreuzbraeu, and the Kochelbraeu, all hospitable
_lokale_, selling pure beer in honest measures; and over the various
Pilsener fountains and the agency for Vienna beer--dish-watery
stuff!--in the Maximilianstrasse; and over the various summer _keller_
on the heights of Au and Haidhausen across the river, with their
spacious terraces and their ancient traditions--passing over all these
tempting sanctuaries of