HANOVERIAN VILLAGE LIFE. 467 



The difficulty has been to reconcile these facts with the reproduc- 

 tion of the poison in the system. The source of this difficulty is the 

 rooted belief that this reproduction takes place in the blood. On this 

 view all the eruptive fevers ought to be equally contagious. But let 

 us once adopt the view that the poisons of the eruptive fevers are 

 parasites, and that the seat of the local lesion of each is the nidus of 

 its parasite, and therefore the seat of its propagation, and the whole 

 difficulty vanishes. We at once see why each has a definite period 

 of duration, why one attack protects against a second, why each has 

 its own characteristic lesion, why each presents such varying degrees 

 of severity, and why they possess different degrees of contagiousness. 

 — Abridged from the Nineteenth Century. 



HANOYERIAlSr TILLAGE LIFE. 



By WALTEE NOEDHOFF. 



THE Hanoverian village of E lies a few miles distant from a 

 famous university town, in a district which still maintains many 

 old-time customs, and which presents, therefore, a curious image of 

 German rural life thirty or forty years ago. 



The approach to E from G is very pretty. The thorough 



culture of German fields and the absence of fences make a rural pros- 

 pect especially pleasing to an American. At the foot of a low hill, 



and completely embowered in green, lay E , with nothing of it 



visible as we neared it except the church-steeple and the red-tiled 

 roofs of the pi'incipal houses. My lodgings wei-e in a house near the 

 church ; my room — the best in the house — commanding a view and 

 smell of the stable and barnyard, with its manure-heap, which we 

 passed on our way from the street to the front door. I still wonder 



Avhy in E the parlor, dining-room, and best sleeping-rooms are 



made to face the barnyard, while the kitchen and servants' rooms look 

 out upon a pretty garden in which the family spends most of its sum- 

 mer days. 



The commune or village of E has about six hundred inhabi- 

 tants. It has no manufactures, and all its people, even its officials 

 except the clergymen, live either partly or entirely upon the produce 

 of the soil tilled by themselves. The tilled land is very minutely sub- 

 divided, the pasturage and forest-lands being held and used in com- 

 mon, while the laws and customs governing this use, and the general 

 system of land tenure, culture, and improvement, are in many ways 

 curious to an American. 



The land belonging to the commune or village of E is divided 



into tillable, pasture, and wood land. The tilled land amounts to 



