They have substitutes for leather, rubber, and for alcohol. They have what they call a _spiritus_ tablet, and it can be used in lamps. It is used by the soldiers in the field. As matches are very expensive they have a small apparatus of two iron pieces that when snapped make a light. As soap is very scarce in Germany hard-wood floors are cleaned with tin shavings. The shavings are rubbed over the floors with the feet, the workers wearing felt shoes. [Illustration: _A Collection of Copper._] All over Germany soap is used very sparingly. Clothes are put to soak a week before wash day and each day they are boiled a little. This plan saves all the hard rubbing, and when the clothes are taken out of the water the dirt falls out of them. They don't use wash-boards in Germany. Pasted everywhere in Berlin are posters which say, "Save the soap." They say to shake the soap in hot water and never let it lie in the water and always keep it in a dry place. Most stores will sell only one spool of embroidery floss to one person at a time. If you want a second spool you must go the next day. This restriction is very hard on the German woman who loves to do fancy work. We saved everything. When we boiled potatoes we saved the water for soup or gravy. It had more strength than clear water. We never ate eggs out of fancy dishes with grooves in them, as too much of the egg stuck in the grooves. We served everything from the cooking kettle right on our plates, so that no grease would be wasted. Many restaurants also did this, and what you ordered was brought in on the plate that you ate from. A great many people used paper napkins for every day. This saved the linen and the soap. We never threw out our coffee grounds but cooked them over and over. We weren't used to strong coffee, and these warmed-over grounds were much better than _Kaffee-Ersatz_. Some people cooked rhubarb tops in the same way you cook spinach. It makes a very good vegetable. We took the pea pods from the fresh peas and scraped them and cooked them with the peas. These are really fine. It is a well-known Polish dish. The first year we were in Berlin we could get corn starch, and we used this for thickening food instead of flour. One of the funniest things was that you could not buy an orange unless you bought a lemon. This worked two ways. The oranges were saved and the storekeepers got rid of the lemons. I have never seen anything like the quantity of lemons in Germany--millions of lemons everywhere. Lemons, radishes and onions were three things that you could buy any time without a card and without standing in line.