Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/498

472 a little reading, writing, and arithmetic is acquired; but beyond this is and a slight knowledge of High German they do not advance. Cleanliness 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 farmer 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