It is one o’clock, and you can’t do better than sit down to the table d’hôte: call it breakfast, if your prejudices run high, and take your place. I have supposed you at ‘Die Sterne’ (The Star), in the little square of the town; and, certes, you might be less comfortably housed. The cuisine is excellent, both French and German, and the wines delicious. The company at first blush might induce you to step back, under the impression that you had mistaken the salon, and accidentally fallen upon a military mess. They are nearly all officers of the cavalry regiments garrisoned at Bonn, well-looking and well-dressed fellows, stout, bronzed, and soldierlike, and wearing their moustaches like men who felt hair on the upper lip to be a birthright. If a little too noisy and uproarious at table, it proceeds not from any quarrelsome spirit: the fault, in a great measure, lies with the language. German, except spoken by a Saxon madchen, invariably suggests the idea of a row to an uninterested bystander; and if Goethe himself were to recite his ballads before an English audience, I’d venture long odds they’d accuse him of blasphemy. Welsh and Irish are soft zephyrs compared to it. A stray Herr Baron or two, large, portly, responsible-looking men, with cordons at their button-holes, and pipe-sticks projecting from their breast-pockets, and a sprinkling of students of the higher class--it is too dear for the others--make up the party. Of course, there are English; but my present business is not with them. By the time you have arrived at the ‘Rae-braten, with capers’--which on a fair average, taken in the months of spring and summer, may be after about an hour and a half’s diligent performance--you’ll have more time to survey the party, who by this time are clinking their glasses, and drinking hospitably to one another in champagne; for there is always some newly returned comrade to be feted, or a colonel’s birthday or a battle, a poet or some sentimentalism about the Rhine or the Fatherland, to be celebrated. Happy, joyous spirits, removed equally from the contemplation of vast wealth or ignominious poverty! The equality so much talked of in France is really felt in Germany; and however the exclusives of Berlin and Vienna, or the still more exalted coteries of Baden or Darmstadt, rave of the fourteen quarterings which give the _entrée_ to their salons, the nation has no sympathy with these follies. The unaffected, simple-minded, primitive German has no thought of assuming an air of distance to one his inferior in rank; and I have myself seen a sovereign prince take his place at table d’hôte beside the landlord, and hobnob with him cordially during dinner.