Over the door is a sign, as time-mellowed as an ancient painting, announcing the price of a liter of beer—risen to thirty-two or thirty-four pfennigs in these sad war-times—though seldom mentioning the beverage by name. That information is not needed in a community where other drinks are as strangers in a strange land. About the spigots at the rear hovers a woman who might resent being called old and fat, yet who would find it difficult to convince a critical observer that she could lay any claim to being either young or slender. As often as a guest enters to take his seat at a table, with a mumbled “_Scoot_” she waddles forward with a dripping half-liter mug of beer, bringing another the instant her apparently dull but really eagle eye catches sight of one emptied. At her waist hangs from a strap over the opposite shoulder a huge satchel-purse of ancient design from which she scoops up a pudgy handful of copper and pewter coins whenever a guest indicates that he is ready to pay his reckoning, and dismisses him with another “_Scoot_” as he opens the door. From a score to a hundred times an hour, depending on the time of day, the size of the village, and the popularity of that particular establishment, a bell tinkles and she waddles to a little trap-door near the spigots to fill the receptacle that is handed in by some neighbor, usually an urchin or a disheveled little girl barely tall enough to peer in at the waist-high opening, and thrusts it out again as she drops another handful of copper coins into her capacious wallet. They are always named in huge letters on the street façade, these Bavarian _Gasthäuser_: “_Zum Rothen Hahn_” (“To the Red Rooster”), “_Zum Grauen Ross_” (“To the Gray Steed”), “To the Golden Star,” “To the Black Bear,” “To the Golden Angel,” “To the Blue Grapes,” “To the White Swan,” “To the Post,” and so on through all the colors of the animal, vegetable, and heavenly kingdom. Whether in reference to the good old days when Bavaria’s beer was more elevating in its strength, or merely an evidence of the mixture of the poetic and the religious in the native character, one of the favorite names is “To the Ladder of Heaven.”