GERMAN VILLAGES.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1976, 30 November 1889, Page 3

GERMAN VILLAGES.

The Herman peasants never live in isolated houses about their farms, i hey come together and form a little settlement, sometimes not more than a dozen buildi -gs in all, So it is not infrequent to see the small valley thickly dotted with these dorfs, or villages, which, if put together, would make a small town ouly. One of these villages is seen to the best advantage at twilight in summer. Everybody is back from the day’s work in the fields, and the place is now as full of life as it was deserted at noon. Eor then only the grandmothers and grandfathers, whose eyesight is dimmed or whose joints rheumatic, stay at home, and tell their young descendants the wonderful stories of witches and hobgoblins, which they heard under similar circumstances from their grandfathers and grandmothers years and years ago. By dusk the peasants have already eaten their supper, The men lie about and smoke their long pipes, the women make their knitting needles fly while there is light, and the children play the identical game their parents played before them, where they join hands in a wide circle, and sing and act the pantomine of the courtship of a soldier and a peasant girl. As one walks over the rough cobblestones of the narrow street he sees the houses, whose tall, peaked roofs are divided into storeys like a pigeon cot, as dirty and much more crowded. If you are courageous enough to enter and climb the steep, rickety stairs all the combined smells of Cologne and Bagdad will greet your nostrils.

The various floors are owned by different people, and even the rooms may be bought or sold like a plough or cart. Two families usually occupy three rooms, using the middle apartment as a general kitchen and sitting room. The poorer people often only have one room, where they sleep, eat, and drag out their entire existence. On the bottom floor of the self-same house where they dwell are stalled the cows and oxen.

By sunrise the entire population is up and out in the fields. Not only does the man shoulder a hoe or sythe, but the woman falls in and works as well. Entire families, except only the very aged, go out. Children, a few months old, who have no decrepit relatives in the dorf to keep an eye upon them until evening, are carried out by the mothers and left under the shade of a neighboring tree. Boys and girls are obliged to attend school until they are seventeen, and if they do not the parents are fined. In the busiest part of the summer —the season for gathering hops and making hay—and other stated times, a vacation is given that the children may help in the fields. But during any of these seasons, if it should set in and rain, with no prospect of abating soon, school is called again, and continued during the wet weather; then the teacher lays aside his ferule until the crops are in. The laborers carry out the food for the day with them. Everyone has a jug of cider or beer, which they drink in place of water. The peasants live almost entirely on grain food and cheese. Milk and butter they exchange for other more necessary and less luxurious articles.