ex pleno. If the latter refuses, the other can punish him by shaking his mug of beer out over his head.

V. GRAND CEREVIS.

20. The Grand Cerevis is the highest form of affirmation in all beer-cases. It is, therefore, to be given as the last and indefeasible testimony, when no other kind can be adduced for lack of witnesses.

21. Since the Grand Cerevis is principally employed when jollity has reached its acme, by reason of the unlimited swigging, and when, by consequence, it is no longer to be expected that general attention will be paid to what is passing, it is necessary, in order to prevent a frivolous use of it, that it should never be given negatively. In other words, one must never affirm on Grand Cerevis that another did not do so and so; but, at the utmost, that he did not hear or see him do so and so. One Grand Cerevis must also never be given against another.

22. The only case where the last clause above given is violated is as follows: When one accuses another of having given his Grand Cerevis falsely, he must establish that fact through two beer-honorable witnesses, who are bound on Grand Cerevis to declare truthfully what they have seen or heard. If the defendant is proven guilty, he goes into the highest beer-shame.

It

I cannot follow up this quaint document further. contains eighty-three sections, describing beer-courts, beer-conventions, beer-punishments, the beer-shame, etc. There are twenty-two beer-crimes which lead to the beershame, seven which conduct to the sharpened beer-shame, and four which terminate in the perpetual beer-shame, or gallows, at which point the offender may be forcibly

ejected from the drinking-bout, if he refuses to enter a beer-trial for the sake of drinking himself back to a beerhonorable estate. Although hanging on the gallows, he can still return, if he will drink enough within a certain number of minutes.

STUDENT RAMBLES IN PRUSSIA.

II.

All that's moisture

Drink with cheer;

Only water

Touch with fear.

GOUNOD'S OPERA FAUST.

TANDING just outside the mighty ramparts of Magdeburg, looking south, I saw only a green infinity of grass. Not a tree for the birds to perch in and sing. "Daz tuot den vogelînen wê," as the ancient Walther sings. How grumpy they were, although it was June, as if they felt sour toward the Lombardy poplars for shooting up their branches so straight that they could not build in them! Even when they wanted to alight, they had to clutch a perpendicular twig desperately, and stand out horizontal, to their great disgust.

The superb

Imprimis, let us observe this circumstance. old Lombardy poplars, regally useless, and planted in the times of "divine right" notions, are here fast yielding place to sweet-scented apples and cherries. It is the triumph of modern utilitarian democracy over royalty. Every poplar destroyed is one more infinitesimal kingling gone. "Off with his head!" Well done for

him.

Walking down between these blooming and sweetsmelling rows-here a king, there a score of democratsyou shall see, far out on the magnificent long sea-rolls of brown loam, gangs of laborers, seventy or eighty in a

row, men and women together, dressed in blue Saxon linen, hoeing in the beet-rows, which reach away till they disappear below the blue horizon. It is the same sad, hopeless, trip-hammer stroke which one might see, some twenty years ago, in our own sunny Carolinas. There is the overseer, too (how much he looks like Legree!), moving to and fro along the line.

It is not that there is such an excessive amount of physical suffering, except in winter and in unusual cases; but the circumstance most deplorable is, the intellectual vacuousness, the lubricity, and the utter crushing out of noble ambitions wrought by this never-ceasing drudgery for another. It degrades human nature to be always a hireling.

As the sun nears the horizon, and "procul villarum culmina fumant" with supper-getting, many a wistful glance wanders thither. When the village bell rings, forthwith they throw up their heels, leap, and jump, and stand on their heads, and butt one another like bellicose rams, showing that they lack much of exhaustion. But their toil is not ennobled by the sacred ambitions of ownership, and such toil is inevitably brutalizing.

For this reason it was that, in the village inns, although the peasants who flocked in to fuddle themselves with beer in the evening were more glib and oily in speech than the sour-blooded boors about Wittenberg, they were far more lascivious. The unchastity of the South Germans is partly accounted for by their softer climate, but here the same temperature prevails as about Wittenberg.

The Germans seem to suffer in their moral nature, under a purely hireling system, more than any other people of Christendom. Manifestly, they are not to be compared with the Italians as to the absolute descent, because they

fall from a higher level; but they are a nobler race, and are correspondingly more brutalized by peonage.

The laborers on these beet-plantations live in immense barracks owned by the planters, and in the towns those employed in the sugar-factories live in the same manner, but in still more deplorable squalor. They live largely off beets and other vegetables, and greens snipped out of the fields, in consequence of which their faces are very fluffy and pulpy. They seem to have in their veins the colorless lymph of fishes. The little carroty-haired children, tumbling on their heads in the streets of Stassfurt, have the ophthalmia to a distressing extent. Nearly all of them look repulsively blear-eyed and watery, as if they were just about to dissolve away.

I talked with one of the laborers on the plantation, who was a trifle more intelligent than most I tried, but his utter ignorance of political liberty was astonishing. I to him:

Said

"Couldn't you get along without a king, think?" The question almost shocked him, and he looked quite

vacant.

"The king gives alms to the poor." It was the strongest argument that occurred to him.

"But, suppose you should elect your king, and allow him regular wages, such as you get yourself, only higher, in proportion to his place?"

The poor fellow's countenance was really troubled, and he answered softly, as if afraid he might be overheard: "Oh, I think that would be bad, for then the poor would get no alms.'

"Is that all you fear? Suppose your Diet in Berlin paid him wages-not half so much as he now gets-and saved the rest for the poor?"

He gave a glance, to be sure we were not overheard,