rt,
and anyone who possessed an empty one could get the measure of wine it
would hold in exchange. Every town and district has its special ways
of cooking. There is great variety in manner of life, in
entertainments, and in local law. There are Protestant and Catholic
areas, and there are areas where Protestants, Catholics, and Jews live
side by side. The peasant proprietor of Baden is on a higher level of
prosperity and habit than the peasant serf of Eastern Prussia; and the
Jews on the Russian frontier, those strange Oriental figures in a
special dress and wearing earlocks and long beards, have as little in
common with the Jews of Mannheim or Frankfort as with the Jews of the
London Stock Exchange. It would, in fact, be impossible for any one
person to enter into every shade and variety of German life. You can
only describe the side you know, and comment on the things you have
seen. So you bring your mite to the store of knowledge which many have
increased before you, and which many will add to again.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Throughout the book, although I am of German parentage, I have
spoken of England as my country and of the English as my
country-people. I was born and bred in England, and I found it more
convenient for purposes of expression to belong to one country than to
both.

CHAPTER II

CHILDREN

In Germany the storks bring the children. "I know the pond in which
all the little children lie waiting till the storks come to take them
to their parents," says the mother stork in Andersen's story. "The
stork has visited the house," people say to each other when a child is
born; and if you go to a christening party you will find that the
stork has come too: in sugar on a cake, perhaps, or to be handed round
in the form of ice cream. Most of the kindly intimate little jests
about babies have a stork in them, and a stranger might easily blunder
by presenting an emblem of the bird where it would not be welcome. The
house on which storks build is a lucky one, and people regret the
disappearance of their nests from the large towns.

When the baby has come it is not allowed out of doors for weeks. Air
and sunlight are considered dangerous at first, and so is soap and
even an immoderate use of water. For eight weeks it lies day and night
in the _Steckkissen_, a long bag that confines its legs and body but
not its arms. The bag is lined with wadding, and a German nurse, who
was showing me one with great pride,