If a German cannot afford to ask you to dinner he asks you to supper, and makes his supper inviting. At least, he does if he is sensible, and if he lives where an inexpensive form of entertainment is in vogue. But even in Germany people are not sensible everywhere. The headmaster of a school in a small East Prussian town told me that his colleagues, the higher officials and other persons of local importance, felt bound to entertain their friends at least once a year, and that their way was to invite everyone together to a dinner given at the chief hotel in the town; and that to do this a family would stint itself for months beforehand. He spoke with knowledge, so I record what he said; but I have never been amongst Germans who were hospitable in this painful way. Hotels are used for large entertainments, just as they are in England, but most people receive their friends in their homes, and only hire servants for some special function, like a wedding or a public dinner. The form of hospitality most popular in England now, the visit of two or three days' duration, is hardly known in Germany, and I believe that they have not begun yet to supply their guests with small cakes of soap labelled "Visitors," and meant to last for a week-end but not longer. In towns no one dreams of having a constant succession of staying guests, and either in town or country when a German family expects a guest at all it is more often than not for the whole summer or winter. You do not find a German girl arranging, as her English cousin will, for a round of visits, fitting in dates, writing here and there to know if people can take her in, and by the same post answering those who are planning a pilgrimage for themselves and wish to be taken. A visit in Germany is not the flighty affair it is with us. "This winter," says your friend, "my niece from Posen will be with us," and presently the niece arrives and stays about three months. There is rarely more than one spare room on a flat, and that is often a room not easily spared. In country houses there are rows of rooms, but they are not filled by an everlasting procession of guests in the English way. When you stay in a country house at home you wonder how your hosts ever get anything done, and whether they don't sometimes wish they had a few days to themselves. To be sure, English hosts go about their business and leave you to yours, more than Germans think polite. I once spent six weeks, quite an ordinary visit as to length, with some friends who had several grown-up children. It was a most cheerful friendly household, but one day I got into a corner near the stove, rather glad for a change to be myself for a while with a novel for company. When I had been there a little time the second daughter looked in and at once apologised. "Mamma sent me to see," she explained,--"she feared you were by yourself."