ut no one wants to be chasing and killing hornets all through
breakfast and dinner, so we asked the maid of the inn what could be
done to get rid of them. She smiled and said _Jawohl_, which was what
she always said; and we went out for a walk. When we came back and sat
down to supper there were no hornets. _Jawohl_ had just stood on a
chair, she said, poured a can of water into the nest, and stuffed up
the opening with grass. She had not been stung, and we were not
pestered by a hornet again that summer. I have sometimes told this
story to English people, and seen that though they were too polite to
say so they did not believe it. But that is their fault. The story as
I have told it is true. We found immense numbers of hornets in one
wild uninhabited valley where we sometimes walked that summer, but we
were never stung.

The proprietress of this inn, like most German women, was a fair cook.
Besides the inn she owned a small brewery, and employed a brewer who
lived quite near, and showed us the whole process by which he
transferred the water of the trout stream into foaming beer. His
mistress had no rival in the village, and the village was a small one,
so sometimes the beer was a little flat. When _Jawohl_ brought a jug
from a cask just broached, she put it on the table with a proud air,
and informed us that it was _frisch angesteckt_. We once spent a
summer in a Bavarian village where a dozen inns brewed their own beer,
and it was always known which one had just tapped a cask. Then
everyone crowded there as a matter of course. In all these country
inns there is one room with rough wooden tables and benches, and here
the peasants sit smoking their long pipes and emptying their big mugs
or glasses, and as a rule hardly speaking. They do not get drunk, but
no doubt they spend more than they can afford out of their scanty
earnings.

In the Bavarian village the inns were filled all through the summer
with people from Nuremberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Erfurth, and other
Bavarian towns. The inn-keeper used to charge five shillings a week
for a scrupulously clean, comfortably furnished room, breakfast was
sixpence, dinner one and two-pence, and supper as you ordered it. For
dinner they gave you good soup, _Rindfleisch_, either poultry or roast
meat, and one of the _Mehlspeisen_ for which Bavaria is celebrated,
some dish, that is, made with eggs and flour. There was a great
variety of them, but I only remember one clearly, beca