In England you can do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb. In most German towns you still find the shops classified on the old lines. You go to one for drapery, and to another for linen, and to another for small wares, and to yet another for ribbons. There are sausage shops and chocolate shops, and in Berlin there are shops for the celebrated Berlin _Baumkuchen_. There are a great many cellar shops all over Germany, and these are mostly restaurants, laundries, and greengrocers. The drinking scene in _Faust_ when Mephisto made wine flow from the table takes place in Auerbach's Keller, a cellar restaurant still in existence in Leipzig. The lower class of cellar takes the place in Germany of our slums, and the worst of them are regular thieves' kitchens known to the police. There is an admirable description of life in a cellar shop in Klara Viebig's _Das Tägliche Brot_. The woman who keeps it has a greengrocery business and a registry office for servants, and as such people go is respectable; but I recommend the book to my countrymen who go to Berlin as officials or journalists for ten days, are taken over various highly polished public institutions, and come back to tell us that the Germans are every man jack of them clean, prosperous, well mannered, and healthy. It is true that German municipal government is striving rather splendidly to bring this state of things about, but they have plenty of work before them still. These cellar shops, for instance, are more fit for mushroom growing than for human nurseries, and yet the picture in the novel of the family struggling with darkness and disease there can still be verified in most of the old streets of Germany.