On each floor in the largest houses are two apartments, usually of seven or eight rooms—large enough, the Germans think, to accommodate a family of eight or nine. And if you are a foreigner, examining these houses with a view to renting, the _portier frau_ will accompany you around, exclaiming how comfortable it all is! There is a _salon_ in the front, a large, finely-proportioned drawing-room, with bay-window and frescoed ceiling, and inlaid floor. Then the smaller room to the right, or left, as it may chance to be, looking also on the street with two windows, and generally a balcony, is intended for the library or sitting-room. Then throwing the folding-doors wide open, between the _salon_ and dining-room, she explains how handsome the two rooms look during a dinner party. The dining-room has an alcove with a large window looking down into the court. Then you follow her through a narrow hall, passing perhaps the bath-room, with the servants’ room above—only five feet high—coming next to the kitchen. “But the bed-rooms, where are they?” you ask, not being able longer to suppress your anxiety on this point. “_Ach, hier sind die!_” exclaims the astonished _frau_, and opens the door to two small rooms, about 10x12. You look at your companion, the significant glance is returned and you start for the next house, or up a second flight of the same, to see if the division of rooms be there as ridiculous. After visiting about twenty-five houses, however, and finding them all alike, you conclude a bed-room with a German is a secondary consideration, and as to “guest chambers,” they have never dreamed of them! Goethe was a true German in this respect, and no wiser than the rest of his countrymen. Lewis, in his biography of Goethe, never fails to express astonishment at the small, dark room, in which the great man slept and finally died. In the handsome old house at Weimar the spacious reception rooms and commodious dining-room contrast strangely with the dark little closet which is called the bed-room. I heard a German gentleman, who came to America at the time Mr. Schurz did, but who was not so successful, and who returned to Germany, and was consequently embittered with everything, say, “The Berlin houses remind me, with their swell fronts and elegant drawing-rooms, of the fashion of wearing embroidered chemisettes when the rest of the toilet is mean and contemptible.” “The Germans,” said he, “put all the elegance on the front of their houses, while the sleeping-rooms are miserably ventilated little holes.” This does not apply to the houses built recently. There is no longer such discrepancy between bed-room and _salon_—economy, convenience and rich designing characterize many German houses now, which would have astonished the German mind a half-century ago.