day in helping
their parents; in going into the woods for fuel; into the fields to
glean, tend cattle, cut grass, or do what was wanted. All the barefooted
children of every village, how ever remote, thus acquire a tolerable
education, learning singing as a regular part of it. They have what they
call their _Sing-Stunde_, singing lesson, every day. On a black board
the _Lied_, song, or hymn for the day, was written in German character
in chalk; and the master, who was naturally anxious to exhibit the
proficiency of his scholars, gave them their singing lesson while we
were there. The scene was very interesting in itself; but there was
something humiliating to our English minds, to think that in the
Odenwald, a portion of the great Hyrcanian forest, a region associating
itself with all that is wild and obscure, every child of every hamlet
and cottage, however secluded, was provided with that instruction which
the villages of England are in a great measure yet destitute of. But
here the peasants are not, as with us, totally cut off from property in
the soil which they cultivate; totally dependent on the labor afforded
by others; on the contrary, they are themselves the possessors. This
country is, in fact, in the hands of the people. It is all parceled out
among the multitude; and, wherever you go, instead of the great halls,
vast parks, and broad lands of the few, you see perpetual evidences of
an agrarian system. Except the woods, the whole land is thrown into
small allotments, and upon them the people are laboring busily for
themselves.

Here, in the Odenwald, the harvest, which in the great Rhine plain was
over in July, was now, in great measure, cut. Men, women, and children,
were all engaged in cutting it, getting it in, or in tending the cattle.
Everywhere stood the simple wagons of the country with their pair of
yoked cows. Women were doing all sorts of work; reaping, and mowing, and
threshing with the men. They were without shoes and stockings, clad in a
simple, dark-blue petticoat; a body of the same, leaving the white
chemise sleeves as a pleasing contrast; and their hair, in some
instances, turned up under their little black or white caps; in others
hanging wild and sunburnt on their shoulders. The women, old and young,
work as hard as the men, at all kinds of work, and yet with right
good-will, for they work for themselves. They often take their dinners
with them to the fields, frequently giving the lesser ch