472 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a little reading, writing, and arithmetic is acquired ; but beyond this is 

 and a slight knowledge of High German they do not advance. Clean- 

 liness is not a peasant virtue in this region, and perhaps I had better 

 say nothing on the subject, further than that the pig is at all times a 

 welcome member of the highest village society, and generally goes 

 into the house by the front door. 



All work and no play makes the peasant a dull fellow, and the little 

 education he gets does not help him much. Many stories of their 

 blunders are current, involving oftenest the local Dogberries. To this 



sort belongs the sign said to have been posted in a stable in G , and 



which notified the stablemen that " it is forbidden to feed the horses 

 or cows with lighted pipes or cigars." A trespass notice, still to be 



seen near E , gives perhaps the best idea of this sort of muddle- 



headedness. Written in Plattdeutsch, it gives the warning : " This road 

 is no road, but he who will travel it notwithstanding is fined four 

 marks and two days in jail ; the informer to receive half." Laws are 

 so strict and well enforced that there are few crimes. Such as do 



occur in E are mainly fights caused by liquor and family quarrels, 



which the pastor commonly has influence enough to settle. 



Owing to the small land-holdings there is in E no distinct class 



of what we in this country call farm-help ; but, when a man has not 

 money enough to hire land in the ordinary way, he goes to a f amier and 

 asks for six or eight acres of land, agreeing to pay so much rent, and 

 giving no deposit, but binding himself to work for the farmer at rates 

 much below those usually paid day laborers — twenty-five cents a day or 

 thirty-five cents for cutting an acre of grain being the prices paid to 

 such boundmen. 



House-servants are employed in E only by the minister. They 



are hired at Easter, or on the 16th of November, and one year is the 

 usual length of the term for which they engage. Housemaids receive 

 from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a year, and a present of twenty yards 

 of linen and a pair of shoes ; it is also customary to give them small 

 money fees once or twice a year if they have done their work well. 



I ought to have explained before, that the village, besides being a 

 collection of people assembled together for protection and to afford 

 church and school facilities, is also a commune in the sense that it is a 

 closed corporation without the power of self-extension or contraction. 

 The village can and does own property, and hires men to do village 

 work, as, for instance, to take care of the cattle owned by members of 

 the corporation. This system of land tenure is said to have originated 

 in the following way : In the earliest times a single family held all the 

 land around it in common. At that time all the land was divided, as 

 it still is, into three parts, to provide for the alternation of crops and 

 the resting of the land. Each man then received his share of the land 

 for a year only, a redivision being made at the end of each season. 

 As time went on, the term for which land was allotted increased, until 



