are big,
light, and high in Germany, and that such a _Kinderstube_ will not be
like a night nursery in a small English home. Besides, directly
children can walk they are not as much shut up in the nursery as they
are in England. The rooms of a German flat communicate with each
other, and this in itself makes the segregation to which we are used
difficult to carry out. During the first few days of a sojourn with
German friends, you are constantly reminded of a pantomime rally in
which people run in and out of doors on all sides of the stage; and if
they have several lively children you sometimes wish for an English
room with one door only, and that door kept shut. Even when you pay a
call you generally see the children, and possibly the nurse or the
_Mamsell_ with them. But a typical middle-class German family
recognises no such foreign body as a nurse. It employs one maid of all
work, who helps the housewife wherever help is needed, whether it is
in the kitchen or the nursery. The mother spends her time with her
children, playing with them when she has leisure, cooking and ironing
and saving for them, and for her husband all through her busy day.
Modern Germans like to tell you that young women no longer devote
themselves to these simple duties, but if you use your eyes you will
see that most women do their work as faithfully as ever. There is an
idle, pleasure-loving, money-spending element in Germany as there is
in other countries, and it makes more noise than the steady bulk of
the nation, and is an attractive target there as here for the darts of
popular preachers and playwrights. But it is no more preponderant in
Germany than in England. On the whole, the German mother leaves her
children less to servants than the English mother does, and in some
way works harder for them. That is to say, a German woman will do
cooking and ironing when an Englishwoman of the same class would
delegate all such work to servants. This is partly because German
servants are less efficient and partly because fewer servants are
employed.

The fashionable nurses in Germany are either English or peasant girls
in costume. It is considered smart to send out your baby with a young
woman from the Spreewald if you live in Berlin, or from one of the
Black Forest valleys if you live in the duchy of Baden. In some
quarters of Berlin you see the elaborate skirts and caps of the
Spreewald beside every other baby-carriage, but it is said that these