ermitted or it was
satisfactorily explained why it could not be permitted. Whether at the
bank, the bookshop, the hotel, the railway station or in the street,
your questions were not merely understood--the Germans knew the
answers to them. And every day the street was charming with fresh
flowers and fresh fruit in abundance at many corners and
booths--cherries, strawberries, plums, apricots, grapes, both cheap
and good, as here they never are. But the great luxury, the great
repose, was that each person fitted his job, did it well, took it
seriously. After our American way of taking it as a joke,
particularly when you fumble it, this German way was almost enough to
cure a sick man without further treatment.

III

This serenity of living was not got up for the stranger; it was not to
meet his market that a complex and artificial ease had been
constructed, bearing no relation to what lay beyond its limits. That
sort of thing is to be found among ourselves in isolated spots, though
far less perfect and far more expensive. Nauheim was merely a blossom
on the general tree. It was when I began my walks in the country and
found everywhere a corresponding, ordered excellence, and came to talk
more and more with the peasants and to notice the men, women and
children, that the scheme of Germany grew impressive to me.

So had it not been in 1870, as I looked back on my early impressions,
reading them now in my maturer judgment's light. So had it not been
even in 1882 and 1883, when I had again seen the country. We various
invalids of Nauheim presently began to compare notes. All of us were
going about the country, among the gardens and the farms, or across
the plain through the fruit trees to little Friedberg on its hill--an
old castle, a steep village, a clean Teutonic gem, dropped perfect out
of the Middle Ages into the present, yet perfectly keeping up with the
present. Many of the peasants in the plain, men and women, were of
those who brought their flowers and produce to sell in Nauheim--humble
people, poor in what you call worldly goods, but seemingly very few
of them poor in the great essential possession.

We invalids compared notes and found ourselves all of one mind. Ten or
twelve of us were, at the several hotels, acquaintances at home; every
one had been struck with the contentment in the German face.
Contentment! Among the old and young of both sexes this was the
dominating note, the great essential posse