A broad highway offering several fine vistas brought me at noon to Bayreuth. The street that led me to the central square was called Wagnerstrasse and passed directly by the last home of the famous composer. As soon as a frock-tailed hotel force had ministered to my immediate necessities I strolled back to visit the place. Somewhere I had picked up the impression that it had been turned into a museum, like the former residences of Goethe and Schiller. Nearly a year before, I recalled the Paris papers had announced the death of Frau Wagner, and certainly the Germans would not allow the home of their great musician to fall into other hands. I turned in at the tall grilled gate, fastened only with a latch, and sauntered along the broad driveway, shaded by magnificent trees that half hid the wide house at the end of it. This was a two-story building in reddish-yellow brick, rectangular of faÇade under its almost flat roof, the door gained by a balustraded stone veranda without covering and with steps at either end. A large bust, not of the composer, as I had fancied at a distance, but of his royal companion, Ludwig, stared down the driveway at my approach. As I paused to look at this the only person in sight glanced up at me with what seemed an air between anger and surprise. He was an aged gardener, shriveled in form and face, who was engaged in watering the masses of flowers of many species that surrounded the house on every side. Something in his manner, as he set down his watering-pot and shuffled toward me, plus the absence of any of the outward signs of a public place of pilgrimage, suggested that I was in the wrong pew.

“Does some one live here?” I hazarded, lamely.

“Certainly, the Wagner family,” he replied, sharply, glaring at me under bushy eyebrows.

“But—er—Frau Wagner being dead, I thought....”

“Frau Wagner is as alive as you or I,” he retorted, staring as if he suspected me of being some harmless species of maniac.

“Frau Cosima Wagner, wife of the composer?” I persisted, smiling at what seemed to be the forgetfulness of an old man; “why, my dear fellow, her death was in the papers a year ago....”

“Frau Cosima Wagner, jawohl, mein Herr,” he retorted. “As I cut flowers for her room every morning and see her every afternoon, I suppose I know as much about it as the papers. It was quite another Frau Wagner who died last year; and the fool newspapers seldom know what they are talking about, anyway. Then there is....”

His voice had dropped to a whisper and I followed the gaze he had turned into the house. Over the veranda balustrade a bareheaded man stared down at us like one who had been disturbed from mental labors, or an afternoon nap, by our chatter. He was short and slight, yet rather strongly built, too, with iron-gray hair and a smooth-shaven face. A photograph I had seen somewhere suddenly rose to the surface of my memory and I recognized Siegfried Wagner, son of the musician, whose existence I had for the moment forgotten. Having glared us into silence, he turned abruptly and re-entered the house.

“Herr Siegfried and his wife and his two children live here also,” went on the gardener, in a whisper that was still harsh and uninviting, “and....”

But I was already beating a discreet retreat, resolved to make sure of my ground before I marched in upon another “museum.”

I turned down the next side-street, passing on the corner the house of Herr Chamberlain, the Englishman who married Frau Wagner’s daughter, and, farther on, the former home of Liszt, not the least of the old lady’s acquaintances, then unexpectedly found myself again looking in upon the Wagner residence. The high brick wall had suddenly ended and the iron-grilled fence that followed it disclosed flower-gardens and house in their entirety. It was an agreeable dwelling-place, certainly, flanked front and rear with forest-like parks in which birds sang constantly, and set far enough back from the main street so that its noises blended together into what, no doubt, the composer would have recognized as music.

But I had no intention of spying upon a private residence. I turned my face sternly to the front and hurried on—until a sound between a cough and a hiss, twice repeated, called my attention once more to the flower-plots behind the grill. The aged gardener was worming his way hurriedly toward me and beckoning me to wait. When only an upright iron bar separated us he whispered hoarsely, still in his curiously unwelcoming tone:

“If you wish to see the Wagner grave, turn down that next opening into the park and come back this way through it. I will be at the gate to let you in.”

He had the back entrance to the Wagner estate unlocked when I reached it and led the way around a mass of flowering bushes to the plain flat slab of marble without inscription under which the composer lies buried in his own back yard. But for the house fifty yards away it would have been easy to imagine oneself in the depth of a forest. The old gardener considered his fee earned when he had showed me the grave, and he answered my questions with cold brevity. He had held his present position for thirty-eight years. Of course he had known Herr Richard. Hadn’t he seen and talked with him every day for many years? No, there was nothing unusual about him. He was like any other rich man, except that he was always making music. It was plain that the gardener thought this a rather foolish hobby. He spoke of his former master with that slight tinge of scorn, mingled with considerable pride at the importance of his own position, which servants so often show in discussing employers whom the world considers famous, and changed the subject as soon as possible to the all-engrossing scarcity of food. Even Herr Siegfried and his family suffered from that, he asserted. He was still grumbling hungrily when he pocketed what pewter coins I had left and, locking the gate, shuffled back to his watering-pots.

The outwardly ugly Wagner opera-house on a hillock at the farther end of town was as dismal in its abandonment as most cheap structures become that have stood five years unoccupied and unrepaired. There was nothing to recall the famous singers and the international throngs from kings to scrimping schoolma’ams from overseas, who had so often gathered here for the annual Wagner festival. A few convalescing soldiers lounged under the surrounding trees; from the graveled terrace one had an all-embracing view of Bayreuth and the rolling hills about it. But only a few twittering birds broke the silence of a spot that had so often echoed with the strident strains of all the musical instruments known to mankind.

The change from a country town of three thousand to a city of thirty thousand emphasized once more the disadvantage, in the matter of food, of the urban dweller. The hotel that housed me in Bayreuth swarmed with waiters in evening dress and with a host of useless flunkies, but its dining-room was no place for a tramp’s appetite. The scarcity was made all the more oppressive by the counting of crumbs and laboriously entering them in a ledger, which occupied an imposing personage at the door, after the fashion of Europe’s more expensive establishments. In a Bavarian Gasthaus a dinner of meat, potatoes, bread, and perhaps a soup left the most robust guest at peace with the world for hours afterward. I ordered the same here, but when I had seen the “meat” I quickly concluded not to skip the fish course, and the sight of that turned my attention once more to the menu-card. When I had made way with all it had to offer, from top to bottom, I rose with a strong desire to go somewhere and get something to eat. It would probably have been a vain quest, in Bayreuth. Yet my bill was more than one-fourth as much as the one hundred and twenty-four marks I had squandered during my first week on the road in Bavaria.

The hotel personnel was vastly excited at the announcement of my nationality. To them it seemed to augur the arrival of more of my fellow-countrymen, with their well-filled purses, to be the rebeginning of the good old days when tips showered upon them. Moreover, it gave them an opportunity to air their opinions on the “peace of violence” and the Allied world in general. They were typically German opinions, all carefully tabulated under the customary headings. The very errand-boys bubbled over with impressions on those unescapable Fourteen Points; they knew by heart the reasons why the proposed treaty was “inacceptable” and “unfulfillable.” But the final attitude of all was, “Let’s stop this foolish fighting and get back to the times of the annual festival and its flocks of tourists.”

The Royal Opera House next door announced a gala performance that evening. I got my ticket early, fearful of being crowded away from what promised to be my first artistic treat in a fortnight. I took pains to choose a seat near enough the front to catch each detail, yet far enough away from the orchestra not to be deafened by its Wagnerian roar—and when I arrived the orchestra seemed to have been dead for years! The place it should have occupied was filled with broken chairs and music-racks black with age, and resembled nothing so much as grandfather’s garret. A single light, somewhat more powerful than a candle, burned high up under the dome of the house and cast faint, weird flickers over its dusty regal splendor. For some reason the place was cold as an ice-house, though the weather outside was comfortable, and the scattered audience shivered audibly in its scanty Ersatz garments. It was without doubt the most poorly dressed, unprepossessing little collection of hearers that I had ever seen gathered together in such an edifice. One was reminded not merely that the textile-mills of Bayreuth had only paper to work with now, but that soap had become an unattainable luxury in Germany. Plainly das Volk had taken over the exiled king’s playhouse for itself. Even the ornate old royal loge was occupied by a few patched soldiers and giggling girls of the appearance of waitresses. But to what purpose? Surely such an audience as this could not find entertainment in one of Germany’s classics! Alas! it was I who had been led astray! The promising title of the play announced was mere camouflage. Who perpetrated the incomprehensible, inane rubbish on which the curtain finally rose, and why, are questions I willingly left to the howling audience, which dodged back and forth, utterly oblivious of the fact that the Royal Opera House had been erected before theater-builders discovered that it was easier to see between two heads than through one. Surely German Kultur, theatrically at least, was on the down-grade in Bayreuth.

A few miles out along a highway framed in apple blossoms next morning I overtook a group of some twenty persons. The knapsacks on their backs suggested a party of “hamsterers,” but as I drew nearer I noted that each carried some species of musical instrument. Now and again the whole group fell to singing and playing as they marched, oblivious to the stares of the peasants along the way. I concluded that it was my duty to satisfy my curiosity by joining them, and did so by a simple little ruse, plus the assistance of my kodak. They were a SÄngerverein from Bayreuth. Each holiday they celebrated by an excursion to some neighboring town, and this was Himmelsfahrt, or Assumption Day. The members ranged from shy little girls of twelve to stodgy men and women of fifty. The leader was a blind man, a veteran of the trenches, who not only directed the playing and singing, with his cane as a baton, but marched briskly along the snaky highway without a hint of assistance.

There were a half-dozen discharged soldiers in the glee club, but if anything this increased the eagerness with which I was welcomed. Their attitude was almost exactly what would be that of a football team which chanced to meet a rival player a year or so after disbanding—they were glad to compare notes and to amuse themselves by living over old times again. For a while I deliberately tried to stir up some sign of anger or resentment among them; if they had any personal feelings during the contest they had now completely faded out of existence. One dwarfish, insignificant, whole-hearted little fellow, a mill-hand on week-days, had been in the same sector as I during the reduction of the St.-Mihiel salient. Unless we misunderstood each other’s description of it, I had entered the dugout he had lived in for months a few hours after he so hastily abandoned it. He laughed heartily at my description of the food we had found still on the stove; he had been cook himself that morning. Every one knew, he asserted, that the St.-Mihiel attack was coming, two weeks before it started, but no one had expected it that cold, rainy morning. On the strength of the coincidence we had discovered, he proposed me as an honorary member of the Verein for the day, and the nomination was quickly and unanimously accepted.

We loafed on through the perfect early-summer morning, a soloist striking up on voice and instrument now and then, the whole club joining frequently in some old German song proposed by the blind leader, halting here and there to sit in the shade of a grassy slope, pouring pellmell every mile or two into a Gasthaus, where even the shy little girls emptied their half-liter mugs of beer without an effort. One of the ex-soldiers enlivened the stroll by giving me his unexpurgated opinion of the Prussians. They “hogged” everything they could lay their hands on, he grumbled. Prussian wounded sent to Bavaria had been fed like princes; Bavarians who were so unfortunate as to be assigned to hospitals in Prussia—he had suffered that misfortune himself—had been treated like cattle and robbed even of the food sent them from home. He “had no use for” die verdammten Preussen, from any viewpoint; it was their “big men” who had started the war in the first place, but.... No, indeed, Bavaria could not afford to separate from Prussia. She had no coal of her own and she had no seaport. Business interests were too closely linked together through all the Empire to make separation possible. It would be cutting their own throats.

Toward noon we reached the village of Neudrossenfeld, where the Verein had engaged for the day a rambling old country inn, with a spacious dance-hall above an outdoor Kegelbahn for those who bowled, and a shady arbor overlooking a vast stretch of rolling summer landscape for those who did not, in the garden at the rear. Other glee clubs, from Kulmbach and another neighboring city, had occupied the other two GasthÄuser and every even semi-public establishment. The town resounded from one end to the other with singing and playing, with laughter and dancing, with the clatter of ninepins and the rattle of table utensils. A lone stranger without glee-club standing would have been forced to plod on, hungry and thirsty. I spent half the afternoon in the shady arbor. Several of the girls were well worth looking at; the music, not being over-ambitious, added just the needed touch to the languid, sun-flooded day. One could not but be struck by the innocence of these typically Bavarian pleasures. Not a suggestion of rowdyism, none of the questionable antics of similar gatherings in some other lands, marred the amusements of these childlike holiday-makers. They were as gentle-mannered as the tones of the guitars, zithers, and mandolins they thrummed so diligently, with never a rude word or act even toward hangers-on like myself. Yet there was a bit less gaiety than one would have expected. Even the youthful drifted now and then into moods of sadness—or was it mere apathy due to their long lack of abundant wholesome food?

The philosophical old landlord brought us a word of wisdom with each double-handful of overflowing beer-mugs. “If ever the world gets reasonable again,” he mused, “the good old times will come back—and we shall be able to serve real beer at the proper price. But what ideas people get into their SchÄdels nowadays! They can never let well enough alone. The moment man gets contented, the moment he has everything as it should be, he must go and start something and tumble it all into a heap again.”

A rumor broke out that cookies were being sold across the street. I joined the foraging-party that quickly fled from the arbor. When we reached the house of the enterprising old lady who had mothered this brilliant idea it was packed with clamoring humanity like the scene of the latest crime of violence. At intervals a glee-clubber catapulted out of the mob, grinning gleefully and tenaciously clutching in one hand a paper sack containing three of the precious Kuchen, but even with so low a ration the producer could not begin to make headway against the feverish demands. I decided that I could not justly add my extraneous competition in a contest that meant so much more to others and, taking my leave of the SÄngerverein, struck off again to the north.

A middle-aged baker from Kulmbach, who had been “hamstering” all day, with slight success, fell in with me. He had that pathetic, uncomplaining manner of so many of his class, seeming to lay his misfortunes at the door of some power too high to be reached by mere human protest. The war had left him one eye and a weakened physique. Two Ersatz teeth gleamed at me dully whenever his wan smile disclosed them. He worked nights, and earned forty-eight marks a week. That was eighteen more than he had been paid before the war, to be sure, and the hours were a bit shorter. But how was a man to feed a wife and three children on forty-eight marks, with present prices; would I tell him that? He walked his legs off during the hours he wished to be sleeping, and often came home without so much as a potato. There were a dozen or so in his rucksack now, and he had tramped more than thirty kilometers. I suggested that the apples would be large enough on the trees that bordered our route to be worth picking in a couple of months. He gave me a startled glance, as if I had proposed that we rob a bank together. The apples along public highways, he explained patiently, were property of the state. No one but those the government sent to pick them could touch them. True, hunger was driving people to strange doings these days. Guards patrolled the roads now when the apples began to get ripe. Peasants had to protect their potato-fields in the same manner. He, however, would remain an honest man, no matter what happened to him or to his wife and his three children. The apparently complete absence of country police was one of the things I had often wondered at during my tramp. The baker assured me that none were needed, except in harvest time. He had never seen a kodak in action. He would not at first believe that it could catch a picture in an instant. Surely it would need a half-hour or so to get down all the details! Queer people Americans must be, to send men out through the world just to get pictures of simple country people. Still he wouldn’t mind having a trade like that himself—if it were not for his wife and his three children.

Kulmbach, noted the world over for its beer, is surrounded with immense breweries as with a medieval city wall. But the majority of them stood idle. The beverages to be had in its GasthÄuser, too, bore little resemblance to the rich Kulmbacher of pre-war days. Thanks perhaps to its industrial character, the city of breweries seemed to be even shorter of food than Bayreuth; or it may be that its customary supply had disappeared during the celebration of Assumption Day. The meat-tickets I had carried all the way from Munich were required here for the first time. Some very appetizing little rolls were displayed in several shop-windows, but when I attempted to stock up on them I found they were to be had in exchange for special Marken, issued to Kulmbachers only. There was a more sinister, a more surly air about Kulmbach, with its garrison of Prussian-mannered soldiers housed in a great fortress on a hill towering high above the town, than I had thus far found in Bavaria.

As I sat down to an alleged dinner in a self-styled hotel, my attention was drawn to a noisy group at a neighboring table. I stared in amazement, not so much because the five men opposite were Italian soldiers in the uniform with which I had grown so familiar during my service on the Padovan plains the summer before, but because of the astonishing contrast between them and the pale, thin Germans about me. The traveler grows quickly accustomed to any abnormality of type of the people among whom he is living. He soon forgets that they look different from other people—until suddenly the appearance of some really normal being in their midst brings his judgment back with a jerk to his customary standards. I had grown to think of the Germans, particularly the Bavarians, as looking quite fit, a trifle under weight perhaps, but healthy and strong. Now all at once, in comparison with these ruddy, plump, animated Italians, they seemed a nation of invalids. The energetic chatter of the visitors brought out in striking relief the listless taciturnity of the natives; they talked more in an hour than I had ever heard all Germany do in a day. Meanwhile they made way with an immense bowlful of—well, what would you expect Italians to be eating? Macaroni, of course, and with it heaping plates of meat, vegetables, and white hard-bread that made the scant fare before me look like a phantom meal. I called the landlady aside and asked if I might not be served macaroni also. She gave me a disgusted look and informed me that she would be glad to do so—if I would bring it with me, as the Italians had. When I had paid my absurd bill I broke in upon the garrulous southerners. They greeted my use of their tongue with a lingual uproar, particularly after I had mentioned my nationality, but quickly cooled again with a reference to Fiume, and satisfied my curiosity only to the extent of stating that they were billeted in Kulmbach “on official business.”

I sought to replenish my food-tickets before setting out again next morning, but found the municipal Lebensmittelversorgung packed ten rows deep with disheveled housewives. Scientists have figured it out that the human body loses twice as much fat standing in line the four or five hours necessary to obtain the few ounces of grease-products issued weekly on the German food ration as the applicant receives for his trouble. The housewife, they assert, who remains in bed instead of entering the contest gains materially by her conservation of energy. In other words, apparently, it would have been better for the Fatherland—to say nothing of the rest of the world—had the entire nation insisted on sleeping during the five years that turned humanity topsy-turvy. Millions agree with them. But for once the German populace declines to accept the assertions of higher authorities and persists in wearing itself out by its struggles to obtain food. However short-sighted this policy may be on the part of the natives, it is certain that the tail-end of a multitude besieging a food-ticket dispensary is no place for a traveler gifted with scant patience and a tendency to profanity, and I left Kulmbach behind hours before I could have hoped to reach the laborious officials who dealt out legal permission to eat.

A General Staff map in several sheets, openly sold in the shops and giving every cowpath of the region, made it possible for me to set a course due north by compass over the almost mountainous region beyond. “Roads” little more deserving the name than those of the Andes led me up and down across fertile fields, through deep-wooded valleys, and into cozy little country villages tucked away in delightful corners of the landscape. Even in these the peasant inhabitants complained of the scarcity of food, and for the most part declined to sell anything. They recalled the South American Indian again in their transparent ruses to explain the visible presence of foodstuffs. Ducks, geese, and chickens, here and there guinea-fowls, peacocks, rabbits, not to mention pigs, sheep, and cattle, enlivened the village lanes and the surrounding meadows, but every suggestion of meat brought from innkeepers and shopkeepers clumsy, non-committal replies. At one Gasthaus where I had been refused anything but beer I opened by design the wrong door at my exit, and stared with amazement at four heaping bushel baskets of eggs, a score of grindstone-shaped cheeses, and an abundant supply of other local products that all but completely filled what I had correctly surmised was the family storeroom. “They are not ours,” exclaimed the landlady, hastily; “they belong to others, who will not permit us to sell anything.” Her competitor across the street was more hospitable, but the anticipations I unwisely permitted his honeyed words to arouse were sadly wrecked when the “dinner” he promised stopped abruptly at a watery soup, with a meager serving of real bread and butter. Another village astonished me by yielding a whole half-pound of cheese; it boasted a KuhkÄserei—what we might call a “cow cheesery”—that was fortunately out of proportion to its transportation facilities. Rodach, at the bottom of a deep cleft in the hills where my route crossed the main railway line to the south, had several by no means empty shops. I canvassed them all without reward, except that one less hard-hearted soul granted me a scoopful of the mysterious purple “marmalade” which, with the possible exception of turnips, seemed to be the only plentiful foodstuff in Germany. But has the reader ever carried a pint of marmalade, wrapped in a sheet of porous paper, over ten miles of mountainous byways on a warm summer afternoon? If not, may I not be permitted to insist, out of the fullness of experience, that it is far wiser to swallow the sickly stuff on the spot, without hoping in vain to find bread to accompany it, or, indeed, to smear it on some convenient house-wall, than to undertake that hazardous feat?

In short, my travels were growing more and more a constant foraging expedition, with success never quite overhauling appetite. The country, indeed, was changing in character, and with it the inhabitants. I had entered a region noted for its slate quarries, and in place of the attractive little villages, with their red-tile roofs and masses of flowering bushes, there came dismal, slate-built black hamlets, almost treeless in setting and peopled by less progressive, more slovenly citizens. The only public hostess of Lahm refused to take me in for the night because her husband was not at home, a circumstance for which I was duly thankful after one glimpse of her slatternly household. A mile or more farther on my eyes were drawn to an unusual sight. An immense rounded hillock ahead stood forth in the sunset like an enameled landscape painted in daring lilac-purple hues. When I reached it I found acres upon acres closely grown with that species of wild pansy which American children call “snap-heads.” Similar fields followed, until the entire country-side had taken on the-same curious color, and the breeze blowing across it carried to the nostrils a perfume almost overpowering in its intensity. They were not, as I supposed, meadows lying fallow and overrun with a useless, if attractive, weed, but another example of the German’s genius for discovering Ersatz species of nourishment. Sown like wheat in the spring, the flowers were harvested, stem and all, in the autumn, and sent to Hamburg to be made into “tea.”

Effelter was as black as any African tribe, but its Gasthaus was homelike enough within. By the time darkness had thoroughly fallen its every table was closely surrounded by oxlike, hob-nailed countrymen who had stamped in, singly or in small groups, as the last daylight faded away. The innkeeper and his family strove in vain to keep every mug filled, and sprinkled the floor from end to end with drippings of beer. The town was Catholic. While the church-bell tolled the end of evening vespers, the entire gathering sat silently, with bared heads, as is the Bavarian custom, but once the tolling had ceased they did not resume their interrupted conversation. Instead they rose as one man and, each carrying his beer-mug, filed solemnly across the hallway into an adjoining room. The landlord disappeared with them, and I was left entirely alone, except for one horny-handed man of fifty at my own table. He slid bit by bit along the bench on which we both sat, until his elbow touched mine, and entered into conversation by proffering some remark in the crippled dialect of the region about the close connection between crops and weather.

From the adjoining room rose sounds of untrained oratory, mingled with the dull clinking of beer-mugs. The innkeeper and his family had by no means abandoned their service of supply; they had merely laid out a new line of communication between spigots and consumers. Gradually the orderly discussion became a dispute, then an uproar in which a score of raucous voices joined. I looked questioningly at my companion.

“They are electing a new BÜrgemeister,” he explained, interrupting a question he was asking about the “peasants” of America. “It is always a fight between the BÜrger and the Arbeiter—the citizens and the workers—in which the workers always win in the end.”

One could easily surmise in which class he claimed membership by the scornful tone in which he pronounced the word “citizen.”

“I live in another town,” he added, when I expressed surprise that he remained with me in the unlighted Gastzimmer instead of joining his fellows.

I slipped out into the hallway and glanced in upon the disputants. A powerful young peasant stood in an open space between the tables, waving his beer-mug over his head with a gesture worthy of the Latin race, at the same time shouting some tirade against the “citizens.” An older man, somewhat better dressed, pounded the table with his empty glass and bellowed repeatedly: “Na, da’ is’ giene Wahrhied! Da’ is’ giene Wahrhied, na!” The other twoscore electors sipped their beer placidly and added new clouds to the blue haze of tobacco smoke that already half hid the gathering, only now and then adding their voices to the dispute. It was evident that the youthful Arbeiter had the great majority with him. As I turned away, my eyes caught a detail of the election that had so far escaped my attention. In a corner of the hallway, huddled closely together, stood a score or more of women, dressed in the gloomy all-black of church service, peering curiously into the room where their husbands smoked, drank, and disputed, and preserving the most absolute silence.

I mentioned the detail to my companion of the guest-room, recalling frequent assertions by Germans in a position to know that the women had been quick to take advantage of the granting of equal suffrage to both sexes by the new “republican” government.

“Certainly,” he replied, “they have the right to vote, but the German Frau has not lost her character. She is still satisfied to let her man speak for her. Oh yes, to be sure, in the large cities there are women who insist on voting for themselves. But then, in the cities there are women who insist on smoking cigarettes!”

In contrast with this conservative, rural viewpoint I have been assured by persons worthy of credence that in the more populous centers some 80 per cent. of the women flocked to the polls for the first election in which suffrage was granted them.

An Arbeiter was eventually elected burgmaster of Effelter, as the non-resident had prophesied, but not until long after I had retired to a bedroom above the place of meeting. The vocal uproar intruded for some time upon my dreams and mingled fantastically with them. From the dull clinking of mugs that continued far into the night it was easy to surmise that the evening election turned out to the complete satisfaction, at least, of the innkeeper and his family.

My route next morning lay along the top of a high plateau, wooded in places, but by no means such an Andean wilderness of forest and mountain as that which spread away to the horizon on the left, across a great chasm, in the direction of Teuschnitz. Black hills of slate stood here and there tumbled together in disorderly heaps. Tschirn, the last town of Bavaria, laid out on a bare sloping hillside as if on display as a curiosity in the world’s museum, was jet-black from end to end. Not merely were its walls and roofs covered with slate, but its very foundations and cobblestones, even the miniature lake in its outskirts, were slate-black in color.

It was in Tschirn that I discovered I had been “overlooking a bet” on the food question—experience, alas! so often arrives too late to be of value! The innkeepess to whom I murmured some hint about lunch shook her head without looking up from her ironing, but a moment later she added, casually:

“You passed the butcher’s house a few yards down the hill, and to-day is Saturday.”

The last day of the week, I had been slow in discovering, was meat day in most of the smaller towns of Germany. I grasped at the hint and hastened down to the slate-faced Metzgerei. As I thrust my head in at the door, the Falstaffian butcher paused with his cleaver in the air and rumbled, “Ha! Ein ganz Fremder!” (“A total stranger”). The carcass of a single steer was rapidly disappearing under his experienced hands into the baskets of the citizens who formed a line at the home-made counter. As each received his portion and added his meat-tickets to the heap that already overflowed a cigar-box, the butcher marked a name off the list that lay before him. I drew out the Anmeldungskarte I had received in Berlin, by no means hopeful that it would be honored in a Bavarian mountain village. The butcher glanced at it, read the penciled “Dauernd auf Reise” (“Always traveling”) at the top, and handed it back to me. The regulations required that I present the document to the BÜrgermeister, who would issue me meat-tickets to be in turn handed to the butcher; but it happened that the BÜrgermeister and butcher of Tschirn were one and the same person.

“Amerikaner, eh!” he cried, hospitably, at once giving me precedence over his fellow-townsmen, whose stares had doubled at the revelation of my nationality. “Na, they say it is always meat day in America!”

He carefully selected the best portion of the carcass, cut it through the center to get the choicest morsel, and slashed off an appetizing tenderloin that represented the two hundred grams of the weekly meat ration of Tschirn so exactly that the scales teetered for several seconds. Then he added another slice that brought the weight up to a generous half-pound and threw in a nubbin of suet for good measure.

“Making just two marks,” he announced, wrapping it up in a sheet of the local newspaper. “That will put kick in your legs for a day or two—if you watch the cook that prepares it for you.”

There was nothing to indicate where Bavaria ended and Saxe-Weimar began, except the sudden appearance of blue post-boxes instead of yellow, and the change in beer. This jumped all at once from sixteen pfennigs a mug to twenty-five, thirty, and, before the day was done, to forty, at the same time deteriorating in size and quality so rapidly that I took to patronizing hillside springs instead of wayside taverns. At the first town over the border I found the municipal ration official at leisure and laid in a new supply of food-tickets. My week’s allowance of butter, sugar, and lard I bought on the spot, since those particular Marken were good only in specified local shops. The purchases did not add materially to the weight of my knapsack. I confess to having cheated the authorities a bit, too, for I had suddenly discovered a loophole in the iron-clad German rationing system. The jolly butcher-mayor of Tschirn had neglected to note on my “travel-sheet” the tenderloin he had issued me. Meat-tickets were therefore furnished with the rest—and I accepted them without protest. Had all officials been as obliging as he I might have played the same passive trick in every town I passed. But the clerks of the Saxe-Weimar municipality decorated my precious document in a thoroughly German manner with the information that I had been supplied all the tickets to which I was entitled for the ensuing week. That Saturday, however, was a Gargantuan period, and a vivid contrast to the hungry day before; for barely had I received this new collection of Marken when an innkeeper served me a generous meat dinner without demanding any of them.

A tramp through the Thuringian highlands, with their deep, black-wooded valleys and glorious hilltops bathed in the cloudless sunshine of early summer, their flower-scented breezes and pine-perfumed woodlands, would convert to pedestrianism the most sedentary of mortals. Laasen was still slate-black, like a village in deep mourning, but the next town, seen far off across a valley in its forest frame, was gay again under the familiar red-tile roofs. With sunset I reached Saalfeld, a considerable city in a broad lowland, boasting a certain grimy industrial progress and long accustomed to batten on tourists. In these untraveled days it was sadly down at heel, and had a grasping disposition that made it far less agreeable than the simple little towns behind that earn their own honest living. Food, of course, was scarce and poor, and, as is always the case, the more one paid for it the more exacting was the demand for tickets. A hawk-faced hostess charged me twice as much for boiling the meat I had brought with me as I had paid for it in Tschirn.

Sunday had come again. The cities, therefore, were all but forsaken and my hob-nails echoed resoundingly through the stone-paved streets. Their inhabitants one found miles beyond, “hamstering” the country-side or holidaying with song, dancing, and beer in the little villages higher up among the hills. The habitual tramp, however, was nowhere to be seen; the Great War has driven him from the highways of Europe. An occasional band of gipsies, idling about their little houses on wheels, in some shaded glen, or peering out through their white-curtained windows, were the only fellow-vagabonds I met during all my German tramp. I talked with several of them, but they were unusually wary of tongue, taking me perhaps for a government spy; hence there was no way of knowing whether their fiery-eyed assertion of patriotism was truth or pretense.

My last village host was a man of far more culture than the average peasant innkeeper. In his youth he had attended the Realschule of Weimar. But Germany is not America in its opportunity to climb the ladder of success irrespective of caste and origin, and he had drifted back to his turnip-fields and a slattern household strangely out of keeping with his clear-thinking mental equipment. He had gone through the entire war as a private, which fact of itself was a striking commentary on the depressing caste system of the German army. Yet there was not the slightest hint in his speech or manner to suggest that he resented what would have been branded a crying injustice in a more democratic land. A society of solidified strata he seemed to find natural and unavoidable. The goddess of chance had been more kind to him than had his fellow-men. Four unbroken years he had served in the trenches, on every front, yet though he towered 1.87 meters aloft, or an inch above the regulation German parapet, his only wound was a tiny nick in the lobe of an ear. Gas, however, had left him hollow-chested and given him, during his frequent spasms of coughing, a curious resemblance to a shepherd’s crook.

The thoroughness with which Germany utilized her man-power during the war was personified in this human pine-tree of the Weimar hills. He had been granted just two furloughs—of six and fourteen days, respectively. Both of them he had spent in his fields, laboring from dawn to dark, for, as he put it, “the women were never able to keep up with the crops.” His only grievance against fate, however, was the setback it had given the education of his children. Since 1914 his boys had received only four hours of schooling a week—as to the girls he said nothing, as if they did not matter. The teachers had all gone to war; the village pastor had done his best to take the place of six of them. Women, he admitted, might have made tolerable substitutes, but in Germany that was not the custom and they had never been prepared to teach. The optimistic American attitude of overlooking the lack of specific preparation when occasion demanded has no champions in the Fatherland, where professions, as well as trades, are taken with racial seriousness. The end of the war, he complained, with the only suggestion of bitterness he displayed during a long evening, had found him with a son “going on twelve” who could barely spell out the simplest words and could not reckon up the cost of a few mugs of beer without using his fingers.