Hence the custom is to ride as far into the country as possible, make a wide circle on foot, or sometimes on a bicycle, during the Sunday following, “hamstering” as one goes, and fetch up at the station again in time for the last train to the city. In consequence the regions within the attainable distance around large cities are so thoroughly “fished out” that the peasants receive new callers with sullen silence. I had been conscious of a sourness in the greetings of the country people all that Saturday, quite distinct from their cheery friendliness of the days before. Now it was explained. They had taken me for a “hamsterer” with a knapsack full of the food their region could so ill spare. Not that any of them, probably, was suffering from hunger. But man is a selfish creature. He resents another’s acquisition of anything which may ever by any chance be of use to him. Particularly “_der Deutsche Bauer_ (the German peasant),” as a “hamsterer” with whom I fell in later put it, “is never an idealist. He believes in looking out for himself first and foremost”—which characteristic, by the way, is not confined to his class in Germany, nor indeed to any land. “War, patriotism, Fatherland have no place in his heart when they clash with the interests of his purse,” my informant went on. “Hence he has taken full advantage of the misery of others, using the keen competition to boost his prices far beyond all reason.” Many a labor-weary workman of the cities, with a half-dozen mouths to fill, many a tired, emaciated woman, tramps the byways of Germany all Sunday long, halting at a score or two of farm-houses, dragging aching legs homeward late at night, with only three or four eggs, a few potatoes, and now and then a half-pound of butter to show for the exertion. Sometimes other food-seekers have completely annihilated the peasant’s stock. Sometimes he has only enough for his own needs. Often his prices are so high that the “hamsterer” cannot reach them—the _Bauer_ knows by years of experience now that if he bides his time some one to whom price is a minor detail will appear, perhaps the agents of the rich man’s hotels and restaurants of Berlin and the larger cities. Frequently he is of a miserly disposition, and hoards his produce against an imagined day of complete famine, or in the hope that the unreasonable prices will become even more unreasonable. There are laws against “hamstering,” as there are against selling foodstuffs at more than the established price. Now and again the weary urban dweller who has tramped the country-side all day sees himself held up by a gendarme and despoiled of all his meager gleanings. But the peasant, for some reason, is seldom molested in his profiteering.