An _Arbeiter_ was eventually elected burgmaster of Effelter, as the non-resident had prophesied, but not until long after I had retired to a bedroom above the place of meeting. The vocal uproar intruded for some time upon my dreams and mingled fantastically with them. From the dull clinking of mugs that continued far into the night it was easy to surmise that the evening election turned out to the complete satisfaction, at least, of the innkeeper and his family. My route next morning lay along the top of a high plateau, wooded in places, but by no means such an Andean wilderness of forest and mountain as that which spread away to the horizon on the left, across a great chasm, in the direction of Teuschnitz. Black hills of slate stood here and there tumbled together in disorderly heaps. Tschirn, the last town of Bavaria, laid out on a bare sloping hillside as if on display as a curiosity in the world’s museum, was jet-black from end to end. Not merely were its walls and roofs covered with slate, but its very foundations and cobblestones, even the miniature lake in its outskirts, were slate-black in color. It was in Tschirn that I discovered I had been “overlooking a bet” on the food question—experience, alas! so often arrives too late to be of value! The innkeepess to whom I murmured some hint about lunch shook her head without looking up from her ironing, but a moment later she added, casually: “You passed the butcher’s house a few yards down the hill, and to-day is Saturday.” The last day of the week, I had been slow in discovering, was meat day in most of the smaller towns of Germany. I grasped at the hint and hastened down to the slate-faced _Metzgerei_. As I thrust my head in at the door, the Falstaffian butcher paused with his cleaver in the air and rumbled, “Ha! _Ein ganz Fremder!_” (“A total stranger”). The carcass of a single steer was rapidly disappearing under his experienced hands into the baskets of the citizens who formed a line at the home-made counter. As each received his portion and added his meat-tickets to the heap that already overflowed a cigar-box, the butcher marked a name off the list that lay before him. I drew out the _Anmeldungskarte_ I had received in Berlin, by no means hopeful that it would be honored in a Bavarian mountain village. The butcher glanced at it, read the penciled “_Dauernd auf Reise_” (“Always traveling”) at the top, and handed it back to me. The regulations required that I present the document to the Bürgermeister, who would issue me meat-tickets to be in turn handed to the butcher; but it happened that the Bürgermeister and butcher of Tschirn were one and the same person. “_Amerikaner_, eh!” he cried, hospitably, at once giving me precedence over his fellow-townsmen, whose stares had doubled at the revelation of my nationality. “_Na_, they say it is always meat day in America!”