Looking at the great green beast our romantic pilgrim prayed: “May heaven grant me honest, friendly landlords and polite guardians at the city gates from Leipzig to Syracuse!” In those old days when the gate was dangerously near the tower and its dungeon, it was indeed of the highest importance to find polite officials at the city gates; just as we might sometimes pray to-day for polite customs officials, the successors of the old grumpy watchmen who guarded the city entrance and wrote the newcomer’s name in their big books. Still more important, too, is it for the modern traveler to find friendly landlords. They seem as in the old days a gift from heaven, for which we must pray and which we cannot buy. Truly many travelers seem to think a full purse buys everything, but they forget the old truth which Charles Wagner, in his book “La vie simple,” has expressed rightly in the following sentence: “Le travail d’un homme n’est pas une marchandise au même titre qu’un sac de blé ou un quintal de charbon. Il entre dans ce travail des éléments qu’on ne peut évaluer en monnaie.” And just these fine elements in the work of a landlord and his servants which we cannot weigh or pay for make the simplest inn so homelike and cozy. A good landlord does not need to fear even Death, who seems to seize only the dishonest one, if we believe the author of a “Dance of Death” from the fifteenth century in the Stuttgarter Hofbibliothek. In a few forceful lines the old artist traces the figure of the bad landlord sitting behind his counter and trying to win the good favors of the uncanny musician Death, by offering him a great stein of beer and humbly confessing: “Against God and against law I sought to win earthly goods, taking money unjustly from knights and peasants as a robber does. Oh, if I only should not die now, I could hope to improve and to win grace.” Many a landlord would gladly follow the example of Abraham if only his guests would try to learn a little from the angels. But how often come to him such wild fellows who claim every good thing he has in cellar and kitchen, and when it comes to pay take French leave. It is well known that, as the old Bible saying goes, the sun is shining over good and bad, over just and unjust, but Luther thought he does not do it gladly. Perhaps the Doctor, who knew so many roads from his own experience, even thought of the golden tavern sun when he said: “The sun would prefer that all the bad fellows should get not a single little gleam from him and it is a great grief and cross to him that he must shine over them, wherefore he sighs and moans.” [Illustration: ZUR SONNE WINNENDEN]