e done in our
country; but as beer had been all day secondary to business, the latter
is dropped for the evening, and the undivided attention bestowed upon
the national beverage. A large portion of the poor, and many who cannot
be called poor, have not the means for this indulgence; and yet men and
women are seldom seen at their work without a mug of beer standing near
them. Ladies have the same provision in their families, as also
students, and all who occupy rented rooms in connection with the
families of the city; from ten to one o'clock servant-girls, with
pitchers in their hands and immense bunches of keys hanging to their
apron-strings, are seen running to and from the neighboring beer-houses
thick as butterflies floating in a summer sun, and seem far more as if
on business requiring haste. No room is sought for renting without an
inquiry as to the quality of the beer of the neighborhood; and the
landlady feels that her chances for a tenant are exceedingly slim, if
she cannot furnish a satisfactory recommendation in this respect.
Scarcely a house in the city is thirty steps from where the article can
be had. The places fitted up with seats and tables for drinking
accommodate from twenty to five hundred persons, and even one thousand
or more in summer, when a garden is generally prepared with seats for
the purpose. At these larger places, music is often provided, and ladies
are frequently found lending the charm and solace of their presence, and
sometimes a good deal more, to the other sex, in this self-denying work,
in which the men have generally been the great burden-bearers. But the
greatest crowds of real beer-drinkers go to another class of
houses,--that is, the breweries themselves, where rooms are always
fitted up for drinking. Of these the Court Brewery is perhaps in highest
repute, and is at least a great curiosity. I visited it three or four
times during a six years' residence in the city, and always in company
with others who wished to see the lions of the place, and for the same
reason that would have taken us to see a menagerie. Why did the monks
never think of applying to such places the figure by which they
protested against the introduction of coffee, "the fumes of hell"? The
smoke of five hundred cigars or pipes rising to a ceiling which had been
thus smoked for centuries,--the hoarse hum of five hundred voices
uttering the German gutturals from tongues thickened by the use of beer,
and floating he