oil paintings unless the parties be very wealthy or where artistic home talent prevails. How shocking many houses in America are made, by horrid crude pictures—in color, houses which maintain some beauty in wood work, carpets, walls, and furniture. The portfolio of etchings which are now sent to the farthest west and all over the United States for inspection, are creating a higher taste, and it is a laudable scheme, although accompanied with exorbitant prices. The arrangement of our Teutonic lady’s drawing-room is so national that the palace and the poor man’s house has the same link of resemblance; for if a man owns but one table and one sofa, the table will stand in front of the sofa, and the chairs around it. This impresses a foreigner as being stupid and dull, and the American or French or English woman living in Germany conscientiously avoids all proximity of sofas and tables. There is some excuse for this stupid regularity in the circles which still have the _kaffee klatsch_; an old and artless entertainment which traveled women eschew, and women of high rank long ago ignored, but which remains a blessing to women of moderate means and unpretentious life. The hour for the _kaffee klatsch_ is always 4 o’clock, and each guest is requested to bring her knitting or fancy work, to take her seat at a table spread with a white cloth, upon which the _kaffee_ stands, covered up with a quilted hood to keep it warm, and flanked on either side by large baskets of cakes. Here these innocent women sit for hours sipping coffee and knitting and gossiping to their hearts’ content. It is the hour _sans-souci_ for the genuine “_hausfrau_.” In such society one can recognize the simplicity and ingenuousness of the German woman, and contrast the startling differences of education and habit with her American sisters.