tation to a stranger is, "Are you
going to Munich? _Da werden sie gutes Bier trinken._"[C]

"You came from Munich! _Ach!_ _da haben sie gutes Bier getrunken._"[D]

Even in Beerland there are different kinds of beer, like the federal
union, one in many and many in one. Between them are sometimes
irreconcilable differences, as for example, between the white and
Actiens beer of Berlin. The former is made of wheat, and is exclusively
a summer beverage, and a glass of it is fondly termed a "kleine Weisse"
(a little white one), perhaps in irony, for it is served in excentric
mammoth tumblers, which require both hands to lift.

Then there is the Vienna beer, the antipodes of the Bavarian. The latter
must be drunk soon after it is made, while the former must lie many
months in the cellar before it is ready for use. In Austria, that
forcible union of States of clashing interests and nationalities, which
is not a nation, but only a government reposing on bayonets, the
population is divided between the partisans of King Gambrinus and those
of Bacchus.

As little as an artist could maintain that he was familiar with the
works of the great masters when he had not visited Italy, so little
could a beer drinker assert that he had seen beer rightly drunk when he
had not been in Munich. All over the world beer is regarded as a
refreshment, but in Munich it is the elixir of life, the fabled fountain
of youth and happiness. It is looked upon as nourishment by the lower
classes, who drink for dinner two _masses_[E] of it, with soup and black
bread. For the price of the beer they could procure a good portion of
meat, but they universally maintain that they are best nourished with
beer and bread.

The Bavarian drinks to satisfy his "thirst, that beautiful German gift
of God." If he is healthy, he drinks because it keeps his life juices in
their normal state; if he is sick and in pain, because it is a soothing
and harmless narcotic; if he is hungry, because beer is nourishment; if
he has already eaten, because beer promotes digestion; if he is warm,
because it is cooling and refreshing; if he is cold, because it warms
him; if he is fatigued, because it is a tonic and sovereign strength
renewer; if he is angry, because beer soothes him and gives him time to
consider; if he needs courage, because beer is precisely the right
stimulant. Where the Americans fly to their bitters "to tone up the
system and enliven the secretions," the Germans re