Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/110

84 was a feature in my new life that was most distasteful to me from the start. As already mentioned, the terms of my engagement included “free board,” which was to be furnished in rotation at the homes of my pupils. Each family was bound to keep me only one week, so every Saturday I had to pick up my traps and move to new quarters. As a rule, my hosts were kindly disposed and treated me to the best they had; but their coarse fare, crude manners, and primitive domestic arrangements were hard to put up with. The people I stayed with were all descended from the poorest and most degraded class of peasants, who had emigrated under labor-contracts from my native province a century previous. They brought with them their domestic habits and had stuck to them ever since. I was surprised to find that their table-fare, beverages, furniture, utensils, and domestic practices generally were all but identical with those of the peasantry of the Palatinate at that very time. I found dishes on their tables that are not known in any other part of Germany. They slept on and under feather-beds, — and, alas! I had to submit to these too, — just as the peasants of the Palatinate do to-day. The very bench at the back of the stores for lounging purposes and smoking was not wanting. Of course, these people had been elevated above the level of a hundred years before, as their parents had had the advantage of the generally civilizing results of life in America, but my hosts were, almost without exception, sadly ignorant, narrow, and low. To be obliged to eat at table and to spend the evening hours and free days with these people, and to be obliged to sleep in the same room with the male farm help, was anything but an agreeable necessity. Yet I made the most of my predicament and got along without friction.

I was, however, immensely relieved when my friend the doctor, at Christmas, in response to my earnest and constant entreaties, persuaded the school board to let him arrange for my board and lodging on a different basis. Accordingly, we succeeded in persuading a family with