retribution than on this. I know an American gentleman of education--and
he told me the story himself--who applied at Washington for letters to
our diplomatic representatives in Europe, and who had sufficiently
informed himself to be on the point of sailing for several years'
residence abroad, and still, when letters were handed him for our
consul-general at Frankfort and our minister in Prussia, asked, with no
little concern, whether a letter to our minister in _Germany_ could not
be given him. I knew a correspondent of a New York journal fearfully to
scourge a distinguished German for his ignorance of American geography.
The same person, after months of residence in Munich, having about
exhausted the resources which it offered him for his correspondence,
gave a somewhat detailed account of the affairs of Greece, in which he
referred to King Otho as _brother_ of King Lewis of Bavaria, although
almost any peasant could have told him that the latter was _father_ to
the former.

Indeed, there is nothing strange about this, unless it be that any one
should deem himself quite above the class of blunders which he
satirizes. It is less to be wondered at that one should continue to hurl
his satiric javelins at those who commit the same class of errors with
himself, since he seldom becomes aware of his own ridiculous mistakes.
In regard to Germany, our people know but its grand divisions and its
large cities; and of its people among us but their exterior
distinctions, and mainly those offered to the eye, arrest attention. We
meet them as servants or employes in kitchens, shops, and gardens, and
on farms, or as neighbors, competitors, or associates in business. At
evening we separate, and they go to their own domestic or social
circles, where alone the native character speaks itself freely forth in
the native language and dialect. There only the homebred wit and humor
freely flow and flash. There the half-forgotten legends and
superstitions, the utterance of which to other ears than those of their
own people is forbidden--perhaps by a slight sense of shame, perhaps by
the utter failure of language,--together with the pastimes and
adventures of their native villages or districts, are arrested in their
rapid progress to oblivion, as they are occasionally called forth to
amuse the dull hours or lighten the heavy ones of a home-sick life in a
foreign land. Could we but half enter into the hearts of the peasant
Germans who move among