nds which Bridget o'Flaherty would scorn to undertake, or,
undertaking, would hopelessly blunder in. Heaven bless thee, child,
in thy early risings and in thy later sittings, at thy festive board
overflowing with Essig and Fett, in the mysteries of thy Kuchen, in the
fulness of thy Bier, and in thy nightly suffocations beneath mountainous
and multitudinous feathers! Good, honest, simple-minded, cheerful,
duty-loving Lenchen! Have not thy brothers, strong and dutiful as thou,
lent their gravity and earnestness to sweeten and strengthen the fierce
youth of the Republic beyond the seas? and shall not thy children
inherit the broad prairies that still wait for them, and discover the
fatness thereof, and send a portion transmuted in glittering shekels
back to thee?

Almost as notable are the children whose round faces have as frequently
been reflected in my Spion. Whether it is only a fancy of mine that
the average German retains longer than any other race his childish
simplicity and unconsciousness, or whether it is because I am more
accustomed to the extreme self-assertion and early maturity of American
children, I know not; but I am inclined to believe that among no
other people is childhood as perennial, and to be studied in such
characteristic and quaint and simple phases as here. The picturesqueness
of Spanish and Italian childhood has a faint suspicion of the pantomime
and the conscious attitudinizing of the Latin races. German children are
not exuberant or volatile: they are serious,--a seriousness, however,
not to be confounded with the grave reflectiveness of age, but only the
abstract wonderment of childhood; for all those who have made a loving
study of the young human animal will, I think, admit that its dominant
expression is GRAVITY, and not playfulness, and will be satisfied
that he erred pitifully who first ascribed "light-heartedness" and
"thoughtlessness" as part of its phenomena. These little creatures I
meet upon the street,--whether in quaint wooden shoes and short woollen
petticoats, or neatly booted and furred, with school knapsacks jauntily
borne upon little square shoulders,--all carry likewise in their round
chubby faces their profound wonderment and astonishment at the big busy
world into which they have so lately strayed. If I stop to speak with
this little maid who scarcely reaches to the top-boots of yonder cavalry
officer, there is less of bashful self-consciousness in her sweet little
face th