Village feasts are common, and great is the excitement when a Kermess is held. The village is decorated from end to end, and the principal street is lined with booths and stalls. Merry-go-rounds, swing-boats, shooting-galleries cater for the amusement of the spectators, while dancing goes on in the inns and cafés. May-day festivities are a feature of the countryside, and the village belle may find her house decorated on May morning with a may-bush hung on a tall pole by an admiring suitor. If there is competition between suitors, more than one bush may be hung on the house, and the various lovers under such circumstances endeavour each to carry his bush into the air at a higher point than that of his rival or rivals. One fair lady this last year, so the story runs, found her may-bush decorated with a miniature figure in khaki hanging head downwards. Intimacy with British soldiers was frowned upon in the locality, and the village applauded the reproof thus administered to an erring beauty who had fraternised with the enemy. One-horse cabs of archaic design survive in the more remote villages, and on Sunday afternoons the elderly local plutocrats may be seen solemnly taking the air in a conveyance of this character. The aged horse does his work in leisurely fashion, and if the rate of progression is slow, the dignity of the passengers loses nothing by the fact. No village is really remote, owing to the network of light railways spread about the country. Yet despite the proximity of Cologne and the constant influx from the industrial districts on the Rhine, the village people appear to retain their simple habits and rustic outlook on life. They work hard, but they also enjoy life thoroughly in a simple way. It is this high standard of simple enjoyment among town and country people alike with which any traveller must be struck in the Rhineland, a better state of affairs surely than the enforced gloom of many an English village, where feasts and dancing would be regarded as a desecration of the Sabbath, and men are forced to drink and loaf for lack of something better to do. German education is open to grave indictment as regards the spirit and temper it has bred, but withal the Germans are an educated people, and an educated people knows how to employ its leisure.