I can only look at various quite small unimportant trifles, such as ribbons, for instance, or pewter vases or blotting-paper or peppermint drops. I know that a German woman either wears a common ribbon on her hat, or pays twice as much as I do for a good one; she is content with one pewter vase where your English suburban drawing-room packs twenty into one corner, with twenty silver frames and vases near them. A few years ago the one thing German blotting-paper refused to do was to absorb ink, and it was so dear that in all small country inns and in old-fashioned offices you were expected to use sand instead. The sand was kept beside the ink in a vessel that had a top like a pepper pot; and it was more amusing than blotting-paper, but not as efficacious. As for the peppermint drops, they used to be a regular export from families living in London to families living in Germany. They were probably needed after having goose and chestnuts for dinner, and ours were twice as large as the German ones and about six times as strong, so no doubt they were like our blotting-paper, and performed what they engaged to perform more thoroughly. But shops of any kind are dull compared with an open market held in one of the many ancient market places of Germany. Photographs of Freiburg give a bird's-eye view of the town with the minster rising from the midst of its red roofs; but there is just a peep at the market which is being held at the foot of the minster. On the side hidden by the towering cathedral there are some of the oldest houses in Freiburg. It is a large crowded market on certain days of the week, and full of colour and movement. The peasants who come to it from the neighbouring valleys wear bright-coloured skirts and headgear, and in that part of Germany fruit is plentiful, so that all through the summer and autumn the market carts and barrows are heaped with cherries, wild strawberries, plums, apricots, peaches, and grapes in their season. The market place itself, and even the steps of the minster and of the surrounding houses, are crowded with the peasants and their produce, and with the leisurely servants and housewives bargaining for the day's supplies. From a view of the market place at Cottbus in Brandenburg you may get a better idea of the people at a German market; the servants with their umbrellas, their big baskets, their baggy blouses and no hats, the middle class housewife with a hat or a bonnet, and a huge basket on her arm, a nursemaid in peasant costume stooping over her perambulator, other peasants in costume at the stalls, and two of the farm carts that are in some districts yoked oftener with oxen than with horses. There is naturally great variety in the size and character of markets, according to the needs they supply. In Hamburg the old names show you that there were separate markets for separate trades, so that you went to the Schweinemarkt when you wanted pigs, and to some other part of the city when you