ls. In
households where economy is practised it is still customary to do
without butter, or at any rate to provide it only for the master of
the house and for visitors. In addition to rolls and butter, you may,
if you are a man or a guest, have two small boiled eggs; but eggs in a
German town are apt to remind you of the Viennese waiter who assured a
complaining customer that their eggs were all stamped with the day,
month, and year. Home-made plum jam made with very little sugar is
often eaten instead of butter by the women of the family; and the
servants, where white rolls are regarded as a luxury, have rye bread.
No one need pity them on this account, however, as German rye bread is
as good as bread can be. Ordinary London household bread is poor stuff
in comparison with it. The white rolls and butter are always excellent
too, and I would even say a good word for the coffee. To be sure, Mark
Twain makes fun of German coffee in the _Tramp Abroad_: says something
about one chicory berry being used to a barrel of water; but the
poorest German coffee is better than the tepid muddy mixture you get
at all English railway stations, and at most English hotels and
private houses. Milk is nearly always poor in Germany, but whipped
cream is often added to either coffee or chocolate.

The precision that is so striking in the arrangement of German rooms
is generally lacking altogether in the serving of meals. The family
does not assemble in the morning at a table laid as in England with
the same care for breakfast as it will be at night for dinner. It
dribbles in as it pleases, arrayed as it pleases, drinks a cup of
coffee, eats a roll and departs about its business. Formerly the women
of the family always spent the morning in a loose gown, and wore a cap
over their undressed hair. This fashion, Germans inform you, is
falling into desuetude; but it falls slowly. Take an elderly German
lady by surprise in the morning, and you will still find her in what
fashion journals call a _neglige_, and what plain folk call a wrapper.
When it is of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool it is not an
attractive garment, and it is always what the last generation but one,
with their blunt tongues, called "slummocking." Most German women are
busy in the house all the morning, and when they are not going to
market they like to get through their work in this form of dress and
make themselves trim for the day later. The advantage claimed for the
p