The proverbs, native or imported, that find most favour in the Fatherland are ordinarily excellent in quality and full of sterling good sense. We occasionally meet with rhyming examples, as in "Mutter treu wird täglich neu," a mother's love is ever fresh; or the less tender "Ehestand, wehestand," marriage state, mournful state; or "Stultus und Stolz wachset aus einem Holz," stupidity and pride grow on one bush; or again, in "Wie gewonnen so zerronen"; our "Lightly come, lightly go." But these rhyming adages do not appear to be so characteristic a feature in German proverb-lore as in some other nationalities. The English protest as to the absurdity of carrying coals to Newcastle[110:A] is in Germany the equally needless task of carrying water to the sea--"Wasser ins Meer tragen." Another picturesque proverb is "Die süssessten Trauben hangen am höchsten," the sweetest grapes hang the highest. The greedy are rebuked in the adage--"The eyes here are bigger than the stomach," and the thoughtless and thriftless are warned that "One may in seeking a farthing burn up three candles." The difficulty in pleasing some people is felt as much in Germany as elsewhere and is expressed in the proverb, "No tree will suit the thief to be hung on"; and there is the equally true remark, "There are many more thieves than gallows," many escape detection and punishment. "Woman and the moon," we are told, "shine with borrowed light," and the wife, in "die Hausfrau soll nit sein eine Ausfrau," is advised that her duties lie within the home and not outside it. It is, however, evident that to treat at any length on the proverbial lore even of Europe would mean not a volume alone but a shelf of goodly folios, a prospect much too overpowering. We pass then at once to a quite different sphere, and seek in widely different peoples some expression of their modes of thought and principles of action, as revealed to us in their popular dicta, and we may at once say that the search will result in the decision that, however much the outer envelope may differ, the inner thought will reveal to us that man, wherever we find him, is swayed by much the same impulses and guided by much the same motives, as he thinks over the problems of life. The resident in a mansion in Mayfair, in a kraal in Zululand, in a sanpan on some Chinese river, differ widely enough in externals and in much else, but we would venture to say that any good collection of proverbs, if rendered in the vernacular of each district, might travel round the world and find appreciation in every land. The burnt child dreads the fire in Samoa as in Salisbury, and that prosperity makes friends, and adversity proves them, is a piece of world-wide experience.