Beer was retailed in beer-houses and vaults, and in warm weather before the door, and places which had the hereditary right of brewing also sold beer occasionally in the living room of the house, and announced the fact by a mat-weed stuck horizontally above the door. In this custom we see plainly enough the origin of the later shop signs. In Oberpfalz (the Upper Palatinate), in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), and elsewhere, even now when a privileged brewer wishes to give notice that he will sell on draught, he hangs up a broom or a triangle of fir boughs. The publicans of a later time simply exchange this primitive advertisement for the more durable ones of tin and iron. Before the windows of the pot houses were folding tables at which the wagoners usually preferred to drink, and the wandering bands, of whom there was then an immense number, were accustomed to seat themselves at these same tables and pass the time in riotous talk and games of dice until the “beer bell” of the place broke up the assembly and drove them to their homes and to the inn.[9] When a fair was held the women dealers in refreshments (Kretschenweiber) took possession of the benches and sold their beer there in cups of tin, stone or wood, while bread, meat, sausages, cheese, etc., were brought from the neighboring stands of the butchers and bakers, for even then people liked to do their business where wine and beer were close at hand. On any occasion of public festivity beer booths were a prime necessity, bagpipes and fiddles were not wanting and a lusty, merry throng danced in the open space between the crowded benches and tables. The Netherlandish painters have left us hundreds of cabinet pictures of these festivities and of the manner and fashion in which they were carried on, and their delightful and characteristic variations of the theme enable us to form a vivid conception of what it must have been. Especially worthy of notice in this respect are Teniers, (whose “Yearly Market”[10] in the Munich Pinakothek contains 1138 human figures, 45 horses, 67 asses, 37 dogs, etc., curiously crowded in a jovial throng,) P. Brueghel, the Ostades, Brower, Jan Steen, who from a fancy for this sort of life himself became a tavern keeper, and Rubens, whose sketches in this sort are strikingly good. During the “Thirty Years War,” that is, at the very culminating point of the epoch, tobacco came into use and the now inseparable pair, “beer and tobacco,” played an important rôle together even then. Barley and “mixed corn” (rye and wheat, barley and oats, oats and rye,) were chiefly used for brewing purposes, but there were always those who preferred plant beer. It is interesting to know that pitch was supposed to give the product of fermentation a better keeping quality. [9] See the Civil Law of Erfurt. [10] The picture is eight feet high and twelve feet wide.