LIFE AND STUDY IN EUROPE 55 



infancy or childhood. Concerts, balls, "tea fights" etc., are 

 continually on the carpet. The poor journeyman who earns 

 besides his board and lodging 75 cents a week considers his 

 " Vergniigen, " i.e. Pleasure, an item of expense as necessary 

 as his clothes. Ladies here not only drink beer and wine, but 

 a,lso punch, or grog as they call it. This however is nothing 

 alarming, no spirit is consumed here that would burn alone 

 and while very many manage to keep jolly a large portion of 

 the time, nobody gets drunk. One of the niceties is rum in 

 tea. Coffee is immensely drunk. A German breakfast con- 

 sists of 2-3 cups of strong coffee, without milk most usually, 

 and two little rolls taken immediately upon getting out of 

 bed. It is foreign and barbarous to eat a meat breakfast. 

 Dinner is a long and formidable aft'air — coffee is used as a 

 sort of lunch between meals and by many as a winding-up 

 of dinner. A hotel dessert is bread-butter and cheese. Pies 

 are only to be had at the confectioners or coffee houses. Cakes 

 are made in vast variety. Every day now, one meets lots of 

 people in the streets carrying baskets of a kind of cake tasting 

 like butter cracker somewhat, and shaped like oo . "Pret- 

 zels, warm and soft" is the cry, but they are invariably cold 

 and usually hard ; they sell at 3 or 4 for a cent. At Christmas 

 a kind of plain fruit cake was in great vogue, called "stolle. " 

 Every family baked for itself, if it had conveniences. A big 

 piece, like a thick stick of stove wood, was presented to Weld 

 and myself from our landlady, and was productive of memo- 

 ries of the further buttery. I intend one of these days to 

 write to the Cultivator an account of a market day in Leipsic. 

 The agreeable duties of marketing are mostly confined to the 

 Ladies. The country ma'ams and misses come into town 

 from all directions early in the morning, some in bags, some 

 in rags, some in wagons, and some in leather breeches and 

 sheepskin roundabouts or sacks. Some of the more important 

 ride, but the larger number take their own conveyance. They 

 bring their truck of all sorts, cabbages, carrots, beets, blos- 

 soms, black bread, 'taters, turnips and all imaginable kinds 



