These village inns are all of the same type. A quaint and placid building with the mellowed atmosphere that comes with respectable old age, usually of two stories, always with an exceedingly steep roof from which peer a few dormer-windows, like wondering urchins perched in some place of vantage, is pierced through the center by a long, low, cool passageway that leads to the family garden or back yard. Just inside the street entrance this hallway is flanked by two doors, on one of which, in old Gothic letters, is the word “Gastzimmer” (guest-room). Thus the new-comer is spared the embarrassment of bursting in upon the intimacies of the family circle that would result from his entering the opposite door. The world has few public places as homelike as the cool and cozy room to which the placarded door gives admittance. Unpainted wooden tables, polished gleaming white with sand and water, fill the room without any suggestion of crowding. At one side sits a porcelain stove, square-faced and high, its surface broken into small square plaques, the whole shining intensely with its blue, blue-gray, or greenish tint. Beyond this, in a corner, a tall, old-time clock with weights tick-tacks with the dignified, placid serenity of quiet old age. Three or four pairs of antlers protrude from the walls; several small mirrors, and a number of framed pictures, most of them painful to the artistic sense that has reached the first stage of development, break the soothingly tinted surfaces between them. In the corner behind the door is a small glass-faced cupboard in which hang the long, hand-decorated porcelain pipes of the local smoking-club, each with the name of its owner stenciled upon it. Far to the rear sits a middle-aged phonograph with the contrite yet defiant air of a recent comer who realizes himself rather out of place and not over-popular in the conservative old society upon which he has forced himself. Deep window embrasures, gay with flowers in dull-red pots, hung with snowy little lace curtains, are backed by even more immaculate glass, in small squares. This bulges outwardly in a way to admit a maximum of light, yet is quite impenetrable from the outside, from where it merely throws back into the face of the would-be observer his own reflection. In the afternoon a powerfully built young woman, barefoot or shod only in low slippers, is almost certain to be found ironing at one of the tables. At the others sit a guest or two, their heavy glass or stone mugs before them. No fowls, dogs, or other domestic nuisances are permitted to enter, though the placid, Bavarian family cat is almost sure to look each new-comer over with a more or less disapproving air from her place of vantage toward the rear. It would take sharp eyes indeed to detect a fleck of dust, a beer stain, or the tiniest cobweb anywhere in the room.