Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850Various
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
In Germany, nothing is lost. The produce of the trees and the cows is
carried to market. Much fruit is dried for winter use. You see wooden
trays of plums, cherries, and sliced apples, lying in the sun to dry.
You see strings of them hanging from their chamber windows in the sun.
The cows are kept up for the greater part of the year, and every green
thing is collected for them. Every little nook where the grass prows by
roadside, and river, and brook, is carefully cut with the sickle, and
carried home, on the heads of women and children, in baskets, or tied in
large cloths. Nothing of any kind that can possibly be made of any use
is lost. Weeds, nettles, nay, the very goose-grass which covers waste
places, is cut up and taken for the cows. You see the little children
standing in the streets of the villages, in the streams which generally
run down them, busy washing these weeds before they are given to the
cattle. They carefully collect the leaves of the marsh-grass, carefully
cut their potato tops for them, and even, if other things fail, gather
green leaves from the woodlands. One can not help thinking continually
of the enormous waste of such things in England--of the vast quantities
of grass on banks, by roadsides, in the openings of plantations, in
lanes, in church-yards, where grass from year to year springs and dies,
but which, if carefully cut, would maintain many thousand cows for the
poor.
To pursue still further this subject of German economy. The very
cuttings of the vines are dried and preserved for winter fodder. The
tops and refuse of the hemp serve as bedding for the cows; nay, even the
rough stalks of the poppies, after the heads have been gathered for oil,
are saved, and all these are converted into manure for the land. When
these are not sufficient, the children are sent into the woods to gather
moss; and all our readers familiar with Germany will remember to have
seen them coming homeward with large bundles of this on their heads. In
autumn, the falling leaves are gathered and stocked for the same
purpose. The fir-cones, which with us lie and rot in the woods, are
carefully collected, and sold for lighting fires.
In short, the economy and care of the German peasant are an example to
all Europe. He has for years--nay, ages--been doing that, as it regards
agricultural management, to which the British public is but just now
beginning to open its eyes. Time, also, is as carefully economized as
every thing else. They are early risers, as may well be conceived, when
the children, many of whom come from considerable distances, are in
school at six in the morning. As they tend their cattle, or their swine,
the knitting never ceases, and hence the quantities of stockings, and
other household things, which they accumulate, are astonishing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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