g on the subject. Let us go from this
mediaeval setting for modern comfort to a smaller establishment. Here
a miniature Germania, with blue eyes and golden hair, presides,
looking like a shaft of sunlight in front of you as she leads the way
about the paths of her gloomy forest. In these, and in not a few other
houses, there is little luxury, no waste, a certain Spartan air of
training, but abundance of what is necessary and a cheery and frank
welcome.

I sometimes think the Germans themselves lose much by their rather
overdeveloped tendency to meet not so often in one another's homes as
in a neutral place: a restaurant, a garden, a Verein or circle, of
which there is an interminable number. You certainly get to know a man
best and at his best in his own home, and you never get to know a wife
and a mother out of that environment; for a woman is even more
dependent than a man upon the sympathetic atmosphere that frames her.
I should be, after my experience, and I am, the last person in the
world to say that the Germans are not hospitable; but there is much
less visiting even among themselves, and much less of constant
reception of strangers in their homes, than with us. Habit, lack of
wealth, lack of trained servants, and a certain proud shyness, and in
some cases indifference and a lack of vitality which welcomes the
trouble of being host, account for this. No doubt, too, the old habit
of economy remains even when there is no longer the same necessity for
it, and saving and gayety do not go well together. In Geldsachen hurt
die Gemuethlichkeit auf.

I should be sorry to spoil my picture by the overemphasis of details.
The reader will not see what I have intended to paint, if he gets only
an impression of caution, of economy, of sordidness and fatigue. No
nation that gives birth to an untranslatable word like Gemuethlichkeit
can be without that characteristic. The English words "home" and
"comfort," the French word "esprit," and the German word
Gemuethlichkeit have no exact equivalents in other languages. This in
itself is a sure sign of a quality in the nation which bred the word.
The difficulty lies in the fact that another language is another life.

The Germans are not cheerful as we are cheerful; they are not happy as
we are happy; they are not free as we are free; they are not polite as
we are polite; they are not contented as we are contented; and no one
for a moment who is even an amateur observer and an amateu