It is the “devil of change,” as the writer expresses it, which gets into the heads of the Gretchens and Katherinas when they come to this country. I think I have discovered a still better reason, which I shall timidly reveal later on, for, in doing so, I must encroach upon national taste and education. First of all, we should consider that especially the uneducated German man, or woman, girl, or boy, loves the _Vaterland_. The _heimath_, with its low ceilings and plastered walls, its sanded floors and wooden bench outside the door, where the father smokes his pipe in the evening, while the mother knits, is all enshrined in the hearts of the children, and the recollection of the _festtage_, when the father and mother put on their best clothes and take all the children to the neighboring beer-garden to hear music, is always joyous. It is only by rumors of “higher wages” that such people are ever induced to bundle up the feather beds, and lock the wooden chest, and start as poor steerage passengers across the great Atlantic. After the horrors of the voyage, and the strange and confusing days of Castle Garden, what do they find in place of the old home and the familiar ways of the _Vaterland_? The daughters hire out probably for cooks. First of all, they are expected to cook a heavy breakfast by 8 o’clock, and nothing seems so hard to a foreigner as this. Their traditions are at once set at naught. They begin to grind on a differently constructed wheel. Just as John Chinaman has to learn that we even turn the screw the opposite way to the way in which he has been drilled, so the poor Germans have to learn that if Americans offer higher wages, they also expect things done in their own way. The dull gray kitchen is perhaps a previous disappointment to the heavy breakfast. No white tiles around the oven; no brassware to see her face in! No open market with benches where she can sit and talk with the market women under their red umbrellas, and watch the lads go by: covered, dull grey places are our American markets compared with the bazar appearance of the meat and vegetable markets of Europe. No concert in the evening for five cents. Nothing—but a long day and a longer evening in an uninteresting kitchen, with different food and different duties. Finding a young, fresh-looking girl with her white cap on her head, in the kitchen of a friend of mine, recently, where I chanced to be visiting, I asked her in German if she was contented in this country, remarking at the same time that she was fortunate to live with a lady who could speak German, and who was so kind. “O yes,” said she; “but then I think I can do better. If I can’t, it were happier for me in the _Vaterland_.”