The truth of the matter is, that no one nowadays has such manners as the _Backfisch_ had when she first came from the wilds; at least, no one of her class, even if they have grown up in Hinter-Pommern. But if you travel in Germany next week and stay in small towns and country places, you will still meet plenty of people who take their poultry bones in their fingers and put their knives in their mouths. If they are men you will see them use their fork as a dagger to hold the meat while they cut it up; you will see them stick their napkins into their shirt collars and placidly comb their hair with a pocket comb in public; if they are women and at a restaurant, they will pocket the lumps of sugar they have not used in their coffee. But if you are in private houses amongst people of Gretchen's type you will see none of these things. A German host still pulls the joint close to him sometimes or stands up to carve, and a German hostess still presses you to eat, still in the kindness of her heart piles up your plate. But this embarrassing form of hospitality is dying out. As Gretchen's aunt said, people in good society recognise that a guest refuses food because he does not want it. Some years ago, when you had satisfied your hunger and declined more, your German friends used to look offended or distressed, and say _Sie geniren sich gewiss_. This is a difficult phrase to translate, because the idea is one that has never taken root in the English mind, _Sich geniren_, however, is a reflective verb, a corruption of the French verb _se gêner_, and what they meant was that you really wanted a third potato dumpling but did not like to say so. Whether your reluctance was supposed to proceed from your distrust of your host's hospitality or shame at your own appetite, is not clear; in either case it was taken, is even to-day still often taken, for artificial. To accept a portion of an untouched dish was considered a sign that you came from "a good house" where no one grudged or wished to save the food put on the table; and formerly you could not refuse sugar in your tea without being commended for your economy. You are still invited to eat tarts and puddings in Germany with what we consider the insufficient assistance of a tea-spoon, but I have never been in a private house where salt-spoons were not provided. You never used to find them in inns of a plain kind, and unless you were known to be English and peculiar you were not provided with more than one knife and fork for all the courses of a _table d'hôte_. You would see your German neighbours putting theirs aside as a matter of course when their plates were removed.