Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/501

Rh minister and teacher, are chosen for six years by the votes of all the male church-members.

The schoolmaster unites in one person the duties of sexton, gravedigger, and bell-ringer. All teachers must have passed an examination held by the state, for which they are prepared by some years' study at preparatory schools and a three years' course at one of the eight normal schools in Hanover. In order to enter these schools, the applicant must be eighteen years old and be able to pass an examination in the elementary studies. Teachers earn from one hundred and seventy-five to two hundred and twenty-five dollars a year. In E—— the teacher received eighty-seven cents a year from each of his one hundred pupils, fifteen dollars a year from the church for his services as sexton, besides fifty cents for each adult's and twenty-five cents for each child's grave dug by him. From the state he got eighty-two dollars, and from the village seven dollars and fifty cents a year, with six acres of good farming-land and a house. All the books and maps I saw were of the most old-fashioned sort, and the teacher was drunk whenever he had money enough to buy schnapps. The church consistory appoints and removes the village teachers throughout Hanover. Teachers are not considered socially equal to nor do they associate with ministers. With the teacher ends the list of village officers, and next come those communal servants for whom we in this country have no equivalent. In what follows, the distinction between village electors and commune citizens or corporators must be borne in mind. Those that I have called electors comprise all males over thirty who live in E——, while there are only sixty-six citizens of the commune. Electors have no rights except that of voting for village officers, while village corporators possess many valuable privileges, a list of which I have given above. Communal servants consist of a shepherd, a cowherd, who also looks after the swine, and a gooseherd, who, in addition, is town-crier, and runs on errands for the Bauermeister. All these men are elected yearly at a meeting of the corporators. Such places are much sought after, but do not descend from father to son. Each full corporator may send out daily with these herders four cows, six sheep without lambs, four pigs without shoats, and twelve geese. The animals are collected every morning at stated hours by the herders, who go through the streets playing peculiar airs on their horns, at the sound of which those corporators who wish to send their animals out turn them into the street to be collected. In the evening the animals are brought back from the pasture by their herders, and turned loose in the village to find their own way home. Sheep, however, are not returned to their owners each night in this way, but remain with the herder during the summer season. For their labor the herders receive very little ready money, most of their salary being paid in agricultural products. Each of the herders receives a house and a quarter of an acre of land from the commune. In addition, the shepherd has the