nts are
narrated to the _bees_--a custom which is found also in Westphalia.
Whether by the help of the bees or not, the Wend farming is especially
prosperous; and when a poor Bohemian peasant has a son born to him he
binds him to the end of a long pole and turns his face toward Lusatia,
that he may be as lucky as the Wends, who live there.

The peculiarity of the peasant's language consists chiefly in his
retention of historical peculiarities, which gradually disappear under
the friction of cultivated circles. He prefers any proper name that may
be given to a day in the calendar, rather than the abstract date, by
which he very rarely reckons. In the baptismal names of his children he
is guided by the old custom of the country, not at all by whim and fancy.
Many old baptismal names, formerly common in Germany, would have become
extinct but for their preservation among the peasantry, especially in
North Germany; and so firmly have they adhered to local tradition in this
matter that it would be possible to give a sort of topographical
statistics of proper names, and distinguish a district by its rustic
names as we do by its Flora and Fauna. The continuous inheritance of
certain favorite proper names in a family, in some districts, forces the
peasant to adopt the princely custom of attaching a numeral to the name,
and saying, when three generations are living at once, Hans I., II., and
III.; or--in the more antique fashion--Hans the elder, the middle, and
the younger. In some of our English counties there is a similar
adherence to a narrow range of proper names, and a mode of distinguishing
collateral branches in the same family, you will hear of Jonathan's Bess,
Thomas's Bess, and Samuel's Bess--the three Bessies being cousins.

The peasant's adherence to the traditional has much greater inconvenience
than that entailed by a paucity of proper names. In the Black Forest and
in Huttenberg you will see him in the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap,
because it is an historical fur cap--a cap worn by his grandfather. In
the Wetterau, that peasant girl is considered the handsomest who wears
the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven petticoats can be
anything but convenient or agreeable, but it is the traditionally correct
thing, and a German peasant girl would think herself as unfavorably
conspicuous in an untraditional costume as an English servant-girl would
now think herself in a "linsey-wolsey" apron or a thick