“I thought so!” he continued, with a triumphant smile. “Oh, if you knew all the trouble, all the untold trouble, I have taken for years to teach the women-folks at home to properly shut doors and windows. All in vain! But do you know how I punish the disorderly batch at home? Whenever I find a door left upon the latch, or a window with the bolt but half-turned, I at once lift the door or the sash out of the hinges and lean it against the wall. This has the desired effect of vexing the women and giving them additional work, especially in winter. There’s nothing like the law of order. But do you call that order, eh?” And with a degree of moral indignation he pointed to a row of milk-stains upon the stairs. One of the chamber-maids, hastening up or down stairs with a breakfast-tray, had not kept an eye properly upon the milk-pitcher. What did our fanatic in the cause of order? Something I had never seen before. He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and step by step he marked a neat circle round about each drop of milk. “You see,” he said, “this is the way I do at home to call the attention of the women to such offences against all sense of decency and modesty, which of course they never see and correct of their own accord. Oh, disorder, thy name is woman.” _Johannes Scherr_. _THE LUXURY OF GOING ABOUT INCOGNITO._ FOR six years the couple had lived in a very small town, in which each inhabitant could furnish a detailed biography of his neighbour, possessed an intimate knowledge of his daily _menu_, and knew just when the post delivered a package to him--the size and shape of which package being made the subject of conversation at the next coffee-party, where also unfailing conclusions were arrived at as to the contents and sender of the object in question. Judge Schwarz, being a person of distinction in town, naturally suffered more than others under the zealous observation of his neighbours, and was quite sure that he could not have a button sewed on his coat without having his friends mention the fact to each other and make their comments upon it;--ay, he went so far as to believe himself particularly favoured by good fortune if the local paper did not get hold of the important event and retail it to its readers the next morning in a sprightly editorial. This consciousness had in the course of years reached such a stage in the judge’s mind as to become utterly unendurable; and as in certain individuals painful inner experiences seek to become personified in some external object, so all this small-town gossip, this puerile mutual observation and control, seemed to concentrate itself in the person of the Apothecary Lebermann, a good-natured but essentially prosy person, possessed of an insatiable curiosity, who was interested in the whole world, and wanted to know everything--on the other hand taking for granted that others had as lively a concern about him and the experiences of his daily life.