The Argosy — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

70 At a German Silver Wedding. six o'clock, so that they can rest indoors during the great heat, and recruit between the two great excitements of the day. But on this Sunday there was evidently something unusual astir. People clung like swarming bees about the doors of the baker’s house, where swung the blue wooden sign, displaying the usual white coffee- pot and lavish assortment of fancy bread, painted with primitive notions of perspective, wreathed for the occasion with laurel and bay, as if the portly baker had just returned from a glorious military cam- paign. I noticed that the ladies of the party ‘pushed bravely in at the narrow doorway, while the gentlemen lingered more shyly outside, whispering together, and nudging each other to enter first. Everyone was in gala dress, and turned pleasant brown faces to ereet me as I entered the baker’s house, which is built, as are all the farmhouses of North Germany (for the baker had some land of his own to farm), in two parts—that is to say, a long brick-floored hall divides the living rooms, which open upon it on one side, from the stalls for horses and cows, which are ranged on the other. ‘The chief work of the house is done in this big, open hall. The women wash their clothes, and the girls cook and iron at the stove in the corner, while the cows and the customers look on from opposite sides, for the shop, the parlour, and the sleeping rooms of the family all give on the hall. This arrangement affords rare opportunities for gossiping with all the old women who look in, ostensibly to fetch their daily loaves of black bread, a yard long, and as hard as a brickbat. - But on this occasion a long table occupies the centre of the hall, spread with all sorts of unusual delicacies. Six or eight brown smoked hams, and as many long blue-black sausages ; piles of bread- and-butter and gingerbread ; flat cakes sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar; square cakes full of raisins, or—a terrible danger to unwary teeth—fresh cherries, with an urmatural preponderance of stones, which have a knack of embedding themselves where they are least expected, 1n the soft corners of a wedge-shaped slice. ‘The table was garnished with huge bouquets of flowers—asters, fuchsias, and lark- spur—which had been contributed by all the neighbours, and accounted for the generally cropped appearance of all the gardens in the village. A few young people were hovering round the feast, putting finishing touches, and Frau Bartles’ married daughter, from the town, stood ready to preside at the coffee making, while her four- months baby, a wickel-kind (that i is, a child strapped upon a pillow, as is still the fashion in primitive parts of Germany), hung by a sop of pink ribbon to a peg behind the parlour door. _ In the parlour sat Herr and Frau Bartles in state upon the horse-hair sofa, and, to my confusion, insisted on my making a third with them on the seat of honour, and placed me between them. In vain I assured them that there must be older and more worthy guests; I was the stranger out of England, and therefore this slippery but honourable position was mine by rights, and into it I squeezed. Herr Bartles I COMIC DOO KS, Eo)