"And for all that you can make no use of the story? Of course what the smith did with the handkerchief and the pot and the comb won't answer for you. You must try something else. For instance, you can doubtless, at your age, perform before marriage three foolish acts." "Foolish acts?" I asked. I might try it. So I went home. My fool will be mistaken." I must have wife was standing before the looking-glass looked very absurd, for my uncle laughed, brushing her hair, and on the table lay saying, her best cap. I said to myself, "This is a lucky chance," took the cap, and thought, "If you throw it into the dirty water in the wash-basin, it will be just the thing." Well, I did so; and she saw my movements in the looking-glass, and before I had any idea what was coming scratched me in the face, and when I said, "Marie, you have me, and can easily get another cap!" she shouted, "Yes, I have you, and you shall get your pay for the cap." And see,' said the miller, passing his hand over his swollen eye, 'this is what she did, and all on account of your confounded story.' "You simpleton,' replied the smith, 'didn't I tell you I played the trick before marriage? What serves before marriage is useless after? "And this is the story, my son," said my Uncle Matthias, rising; "and, if you are wise, you can act accordingly." I also rose, walked to the window, thought the story over in my mind, and at last turned, saying, "It's a confounded anecdote, uncle. You generally tell much better ones." "Foolish acts," said my uncle; and I paced up and down the room reflecting on the matter, and finally said, "Yes, I believe, uncle, I can soon set everything to rights." "Do so, then," said my uncle. "And you think I shall then remain master of my house?" Foolish "Yes, my son, I think so. not wrong acts. You see, if she begins to scold, you can throw your arms around her neck, and say, 'Let it pass! let it pass! Don't mind that affair, look instead at my heart, which belongs to you, and will beat for you forever.' And then, my boy," he added, "then you can still bring in the kneeling; for you may say what you like it belongs there." I reflected upon the matter a short time, "Yes," cried my uncle laughing, "be- and then said to myself, "He is your cause I generally tell you the practical ap-mother's brother, and you ought to let plication at once, and now you must find him have his own way." it yourself." "You don't expect me to throw my betrothed's cap into a wash-basin, or wipe off the table with her silk handkerchief?" "You can try it," laughed the old rogue. "Well," said I, "that will do me no good." The old man laughed still more, and at last said, "Boy, how old are you really?" I did not care to hear much about my age during the time of my betrothal, and thinking, "Aha, you are sprinkling a little pepper again!" "asked, "What do you mean?" "Oh," said he, "I mean nothing." "Then let me tell you," I said somewhat sharply, "I was forty-one years old the 7th of last November." "So," said he, "you are in the forties." "Yes, perhaps that doesn't suit you?" I might here relate what acts I performed, but will refrain. Some accident might suffer the account to fall into my wife's hands, and she might possibly notice that all these things had been secretly planned, and she had been tricked into her goodness, and therefore say, "Stop! this game won't do; you have been cheating me. I'll shuffle the cards. There'! I have the lead, and now take care. We'll see if you can't be fooled." But often when now, as my wife, she flits silently and busily about, constantly attending to my wants, and affectionately yielding to my wishes, I think, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having commenced with deception;" and a short time ago I said to my uncle, "I'll tell you what, I'm going to confess to her the cause of my foolish acts before marriage." Oh, I don't care," he replied, "I was only thinking of the proverb: He who in Do they trouble you?" asked my the twenties is not handsome, in the thir-uncle. "Every clever fellow must do one ties not strong, in the forties not wise, foolish and one sensible act; but he ought and in the fifties not rich, can be let alone, not to speak of them himself, or both will and will amount to nothing.' And you lose their virtue. You are living very don't seem to be wise in the forties." happily; be content with that." "Uncle Matthias," said I, drawing myself up proudly, "he who takes me for a "Yes," said I, "it's all very well for you to talk so; but I often feel as if we might be still happier, if she had the rule." "My son," replied old Uncle Matthias, putting his hand on my shoulder, "all the happiness possible in this world does not fall into one pair of hands,- be satisfied with what you have. As for the married state, don't you know old Jochen Smith? I mean old Jochen Smith who lived with his wife till he was eighty, and was buried with her on the same beautiful summer Sunday morning. Well, he once said to me, for I myself know nothing about it, 'Herr Sergeant, married life is like an apple-tree, one sits in it and plucks and plucks; but the fairest and reddest apples grow near the top, where nobody is tall enough to reach. If a man is foolish, and wants to get the apples by force, he takes a stick and knocks down the finest ones, spoiling them, and also breaking off the branches on which are the buds: the sensible man lets them quietly remain, and waits until late in the autumn; then they will fall into his lap of their own accord, and taste much sweeter.' And therefore, my boy," added my old uncle, while his dear old face wore a grave, kindly expression, "don't knock off your red apples before the time, but wait till late in the autumn; then, when you take your wife the last beautiful one, tell her the story of your tricks before marriage, and she will laugh over them herself." From Fraser's Magazine. GERMAN HOME LIFE.* BY A LADY. VIII. MEN. WHEN a man, as will now and again happen, has the misfortune to write and publish a more than usually feeble story, the critics, by a simple yet ingenious method, gently convey to him that he has mistaken his vocation in life. "Miss So-and-So," they say, "will probably be surprised to hear that all her men are monsters; that the archangelic do not as yet walk amongst us clothed in tweed and broadcloth; nor do Oxford shoes disguise the cloven foot of our acquaintance," and so on, through paragraphs of infinitely cruel jocosity, admirably calculated not only to extinguish the well-meaning young It has been found impossible to finish these papers within the limits of our present number. An article on "Marriage" will conclude the series. man, but also pour décourager les autres; "les autres" being the enterprising ladies from out of whose midst his critics are supposed to have singled him. These papers being avowedly written by a woman, she perhaps ought to leave all opinion or comment on "the head and crown of things" to the more competent virile pen. She would only venture, by way of apology and justification, to say thus much: that if "some power" have given "the giftie " to men to see themselves and each other all round as other (men) see them, women are not altogether out in the dark; they see men from their own (i.e. the feminine) standpoint, and this coign of vantage is not an altogether unimportant one. A man in his dressing-gown and slippers may show more of the real man that is in him to his wife than is ever likely to be known to his fellow-swaggerers at the club, or the Major Pendennises of life with whom he lounges along the Row in the morning, or sneers languidly through a summer's afternoon. To say of men, generally, that they are of the "superior" sex, is to say very little when applied to German men. Unfortunately, the genius of the language and the scheme of creation do not admit of "superiorest;" so we must go round about it, and say that in Germany the relative position of the sexes is what one imagines to be conveyed in the sentence, "And the sons of God took unto themselves daughters of men." It is not, however, my purpose here to speak specifically of the German “husband," because that, though an essentially feminine view of the subject, would be to limit it to an inconveniently narrow sphere; and a man, whether bond or free, whether bachelor or benedick"a man's a man for a' that." And, to begin with the physical aspects of the matter, we may venture to affirm, without fear of contradiction, that from earliest childhood the German man has privileges above the German woman, and these privileges grow always and increase. We know what their respective physical education is: the boy belongs to his Turn-Verein; he mixes with his inferiors, superiors, and equals; he profits by his holidays to take long walking-tours; he lives entirely during these summer excursions in the rough, carrying his modest wardrobe in a knapsack, eating how, when, where he can; falling in with parties of other youthful students like himself, fraternizing on the road, hob-a-nobbing in the inns, singing with his full young voice the Volkslieder, the Studentenlieder, the 28 Soldatenlieder of his fatherland. comes across ruined castles, ancient forHe tresses, Druid circles, quaint old hunting Schlösser, convents, churches. Straightway he learns all about what he sees; if he be not himself a student or an antiquarian, one or other of the party is; his young chest is bared to the breeze; his strong young limbs climb the mountain; his eye roves keenly and restlessly to right and left; what there is to be seen he will see; what there is to learn he will learn; what may be known he will know. The scents of the thyme and the pine linger in his tawny young mane; he takes a draught of milk, a draught of water, with the simple food his wallet affords; he lies down, with his plaid under his head, in the shadow of the rock, or beneath the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, and enjoys his noonday nap. He saw the sun rise this morning, and has walked many an upward mile since daybreak. Seeing him lying there, you may, perhaps, take him for a young artisan (auf der Wanderschaft), as perhaps he is (for boys of all ranks will go out to spend their holidays in the summer woods), or perhaps you discern, despite his rough clothes and his modest equipment, signs of that good blood in him which, as the proverb says, ne peut mentir. In case, though he may not look what you would call a "gentleman," he looks a man; with manly purpose and intention even in his sleeping eyelids and smiling mouth. He will get up presently, and go singing through the sunlit woods, a gay, a cheery, enviable young athlete. So, with a certain rough freedom, breathing nature, full of quaint simple prose and poetry, with infinite capabilities of enthusiasm, with dim aspirations and vague yearnings after possible impossibilities, the German youth goes his way, through ideal paths into the great reality of the future. any ness into civil life with him as shall combring such habits of order and thoroughpel promptness and obedience, and make the refractory look and the insubordinate word alike impossible. Taken from the receipt of custom, from the yard-wand or the coffee-mill, and set down in the barrack-yard, he learns new things, other things, more things, than if he passed his life behind a ledger, measuring ribbons, are men of noble blood, of fine type, of or weighing out groceries. fair presence. The very aspect of them His officers is an education for him; he admires, without envying them; he acknowledges their superiority, and does not hate them for it. For, to the honour of the German nation let it be said, that even the rankest radical spits out his spite less at the person than at the thing he hates. With this promptness to obey the word of command we find the corresponding roughness and readiness in giving it; dismissed from volunteer duty, he is apt to carry sol datesque forms into private life, to indulge in laconic utterances, and look for military exactitude of obedience. So much for the non-professional soldier; for the man who may yet have to do real hard service in the Landwehr, or harder yet in the Landsturm, but who, for the time being, go back to citizen life once more. is released from his military duties, may army has been the only profession in GerHitherto, for men of gentle birth, the many. No man who wrote von before his name had any other career open to him, unless it were diplomacy; but, it must be remembered, that in the preimperial days, when Prussia was a thirdrate power, diplomacy could offer but very limited prospects in life to men of good family and small means. representatives of the smaller States not The diplomatic unfrequently resolved themselves into quite so ornamental as an ambassador, modest consuls, who, though perhaps not envoy, or minister, were at least equally useful, with the further advantage of being infinitely less expensive. Then there was the higher civil service (höhere Beamtenposts represented but a dwarfed ambition; Stand). But even the highest of such and again the posts were not many, and the ladder to be climbed, rung by rung, painfully long; so that by the time a man had attained to the dignity of Finanz-Minister, or Wirklicher Geheimer-Rath, wintry snow would already be lying on his "fros Speak of the German, and you see the soldier. It is not only that the warlike element is the predominating one, it is that obedience, punctuality, endurance, high courage, silent perseverance, mark the whole manner of the man. pulsory military service, so much bespokThe comen, bewritten, commended, condemned, has had its fine moral influence on the nation at large. A man has served his time as Freiwilliger; and he returns to his groceries, his farmeries, his draperies. He has learned exactitude, punctuality, obedience. Can there be a finer practical ty pow." education? He has learned to hear, not to speak, and to obey. Attorneys In turn, he will | ling crew-have ever been inodorous in -a clamorous, noisy, cack the nostrils of the refined, and in Ger- day; and though one would prefer a more many you would search in vain for scions independent standpoint, and would rather of noble blood amongst their turbulent ranks. "I do not like," said Dr. Johnson, referring to a person who had just left the room, "to speak ill of any one behind his back, but I believe the gentleman is an attorney!" The Church (in Protestant Germany), in spite of the late king of Prussia's attempted episcopacies and Anglicanism, remains utterly unattractive in aristocratic eyes. They were literary "episcopacies." The king who invented the bishop could not create the see. Bankers are almost exclusively children of Israel (occasionally ennobled; baronisirt, if they had been accommodating in the matter of timely loans), and whilst commerce seemed to be the prerogative of the plebeian, the army remained a patrician monopoly. But already, if they have not changed, circumstances are changing all that. a man should make money for himself than take it from another, yet we must not be impatient. Patrician blood is found to mix very kindly with plebeian money; the young lady is charmed to write the magic prefix before her name, and to find herself launched into higher circles; the young gentleman discovers that an opulent father-in-law is extremely convenient on occasion, and forgives the want of a pedigree in consideration of the plethora of pelf. One or other of the offspring of such a marriage may come into the world with commercial instincts (as some babes are said to come mouthing silver spoons), and a purely ornamental young gentleman and lady thus become the unconscious founders of a race of merchant princes. It has been said that the well-born German is distinguished for his morgue and disregard of those in a lower station than However great Germany may be as a himself. This was, and is, his chief remilitary nation, bristling all over with hel- proach in the eyes of his middle-class felmet-spikes and fortresses, she can only low-countrymen. He does not conceal become really and abidingly great when that he despises their want of manner, years of peace shall have consolidated their glaring solecisms, their extraordinaher position. Commerce, the child of ry coarseness of behaviour and absence peace and the mother of plenty, is after all of tact. They, who perhaps know as the furnisher of the thews and the sinews much as he does, are richer than he is, of war. The country of the milliards are unconscious of all that jars and grates knows, as well as any other country- upon one of a finer fibre than themselves, nay, better, if the history of her past and are apt to declare that he trades on finance be worth anything the value of his nobility, and assumes a merit that he full coffers and the dignity of no national is far from possessing. Not from the sodebt. That she cannot remain politically called "lower orders" is resentment ever great unless she become commercially likely to become dangerous, but from the great; that the fruitful rivalries of peace well-educated, underbred middle class; the are the balm and oil her bleeding wounds very middling-if refinement of speech, require there are abundant evidences to suavity of manner, and gentleness of uttershow. In her desire for a wider field and ance count for anything. The middle ampler opportunities, she has stretched class as we understand it- one brother a out tentative fingers across ticklish fron- merchant, another in the Guards, the eldtiers, warily touching this or that border- est son of the house heir to a baronetcy, town, casting covetous eyes towards this the youngest walking the earth in an or that convenient port, sending out con- M.B. waistcoat, and waiting for the family suls to the east and to the west, and estab- living-is almost incomprehensible to lishing relations to the north and to the the ordinary German mind; but let us south. And these very facts, this very hope that the day may not be far distant attitude, open up vast future prospects to when the arrogance of the aristocrat may the young manhood of Germany. As a be tempered, and the tone of the citizen great power, Prussia (and her dependen- refined. So long as commerce means cies) will be able to dispense with petty mere shop-keeping, every petty grocer pride; noble fathers will see no dishonour writes Kaufmann (merchant) over his in having rich sons; bankers and merchants will be admitted into "society," and honest independence will know how to exact respect and hold its own against expiring prejudice. Marriages with the daughters of rich speculators and contract ors are already quite the order of the shopdoor, and every Jew usurer signs himself Banquier, it is to be feared that a commercial career will not prove very attractive in the eyes of, or draw many recruits from, the upper ranks of society. It is not given to every man to be what in common parlance is called "born a gen tleman; " but if his birth be not gentle, | to the entire and untiring devotion which his manners may make him so; and we Englishwomen accept with all the calm all know that a "cotton lord" may be a unconsciousness of a right. No man truer gentleman than the descendant of a rises to open the door for you when you "hundred earls." The modest independ- leave the room; if cups of tea or coffee ence and self-reliance which bring about have to be handed about, it is the lady of suavity of manners and an absence at the house that will carry them round; she once of the servile or the arrogant in a will be rewarded with a " Tausend Dank, man's intercourse with those of another meine Gnädigste," but the "most grarank is not at a premium in Germany, cious" will be allowed to trot about all where either self-assertion or obsequious- the same. A man need not wait (in that ness strikes the outsider with a sense of happy land) for "pain and anguish" to pained surprise. "rack the brow" before the ministering angels appear upon the scene. You (one of the angels) may search an hour for your sortie de bal in a cloak-room, before one out of that group of glittering beings assembled round the door will put out a helping hand. When at last you emerge from your difficulties and pass down the stairs, they will draw themselves up, in their heels together, and bring their heads to the level of their sword-belts; and if that is not devotion, chivalric behaviour, and splendid respect, the world has none to show, and you are an exacting and irrational malcontent. The German gentleman, the man of noble birth, of splendid presence, of polished if of cold and arrogant manners, fails where we might expect him to fail. “Without love," says our great humourist, "I can fancy no true gentleman' love that is, not of the individual, which may be but mere sublimated selfishness, but that chivalrous devotion which high-mind-stramme militärische Haltung, click ed manhood ever bears to gentle womanhood. The German gentleman may be gallant, he may be a man of pleasure, a lady-killer, a grand viveur; as a rule he is perfectly ready to flirt with any pretty woman, to make daily Fenster parades before her windows, to whisper soft senti- In everything the German is controlled. mental nothings to her during the course He is controlled in his love-makings and of the cotillon, it may be even slightly to marryings; he is controlled in the utter"compromise" her. She is, of course, a ance of his opinion; he is controlled in married woman (for these attentions would his goings-out and his comings-in. The mean marriage to a girl), so she knows, journalist is liable at any moment to fine and ought to know, how to take care of and imprisonment; the caricaturist to arherself. He will go away, and laugh over rest; of liberty of the press there can be his little social successes, when his com- no question; of the license of the law no rades banter him on his bonnes fortunes; doubt. In the old gambling days of Baand she will be backbitten in the Kaf den and Hombourg, no native officer was fees, and a tolerant society will view the permitted to play at the tables; the money matter with indifference, unless indeed it of the State must remain absolutely in the comes to such a climax as makes indiffer- State pocket; but this fatherly solicitude ence no longer possible; and even then, for the coin of the country did not extend an easy-going temper disposes the lookers- itself to the pocket of the peasant, who on generally to be tolerably lenient. would stand gloating through long SunTheir bark is much worse than their bite day afternoons at the heaps of gold, venin these matters, and after all, one must ture at last his florin or his thaler, and not draw the line too tight. Marriage is retire into his workaday world on Monbeset with a thousand difficulties; life is day a disillusioned chaw-bacon. Control more amusing behind the scenes of a the- touches even the follies and flirtations of atre than in the dull domestic round. One the young. Lately, in a northern capital, likes to have one's moments of relaxation, garrisoned by Prussian troops, an ardent and eternal parade, civil as well as milita- young lieutenant and a coy and bashful ry, is rather a gilding of the lily. Women maiden found themselves for a moment, are well enough to be "a moment's ornament," but life is easier en garçon. One has a thousand egotisms and ambitions to occupy one's time and thoughts, and a man gallooned all over with gold, and staggering under orders, cannot be expected to sit like Hercules at Omphale's feet. German ladies are not accustomed by some rare chance, in a deserted tearoom alone. The enamoured youth had just caught his fair one by the hand, when her most intimate of intimate bosomfriends entered. The poor girl started up in terror, and, forgetful alike of her love and her lover, broke out, "Pray, pray, best Evelina, do not say what you have |