There has been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, "that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil," is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of nurse, cook, and house-maid as she once was. But even to-day her economies and her ability to keep her house with little outside assistance are amazing. Some of the most delightful meals I have taken, have been in professional households, where small incomes made it necessary that wife and daughters should do most of the work. The German professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of learning at your service, when he raises his glass to you, filled with his best, with a smile and a hearty "Prosit," he is hard to beat as a host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing like overindulgence to make one crave simplicity, and no doubt this accounts for the fact that the really great ones of earth are satisfied and happy with enough, and abhor too much. They tell me that the Dienstmaedchen is no longer what she used to be, but to my untutored eye her duties still seem to be as comprehensive as those of a Sioux squaw, and her performances unrivalled. As is to be expected, Germany is not blessed with trained servants. They are helpers rather than professional servants. In the scores of houses, public and private, where I have been a guest, only in one or two had the servants more than an alphabetical knowledge of what was due to one's clothes and shoes. The servants are rigidly protected by the state: they must have so much time off, they cannot be dismissed without weeks of warning, and they themselves carry books with their moral and professional biographies therein, which are always open to the inspection of the police; and they must all be insured.