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Chap. .
NORTH GERMAN TABLE-D’HOTE.
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After a day’s sojourn I feel we shall not regret the
change; for though the rustic-built, straw-thatched
house is clean enough to satisfy a Dutchman, the
heat is intense: shade there is in the extensive garden
of the hotel—a luxury, it must be owned, on the
seacoast—but beyond, nothing—a mere waste of sand and
stubble. The sea may be Baltic, but it is not salt, and
one half fresh Trave water; so after a day’s
sauntering in the garden, listening to the never-ending polkas
of the brazen band, and watching the swallow-tail
and Apollo butterfles flitting from flower to flower, we
feel all ready again to make a start.
Our table-d’hote here is a wonderful affair, both as
regards company and comestibles. In these days, when,
except in full dress, ladies are covered up to their very
chins, the sight of a North-German dinner-table, with
its fair attendants “ décolletées ” at two o’clock, under a
summer sun, is somewhat astonishing; such an expanse,
too, of brown throats and arms, for they walk out even in
the streets of Hamburg unprotected against the sun’s
rays. The back view of a table-d’hbte in these parts
is quite a sight, though not perhaps an attractive one;
the women, from fear of dirt I suppose, hitch up their
petticoats behind into a sort of haycock, causing an
exposé of their feet, good, solid, and useful for common
purposes, capable of carrying them with ease when
they weigh sixteen stone, and never breaking down,
clad in gray boots, and twisted one within another in
most ungraceful fashion.
The old ladies are venerable in their gray hair and
plaited caps; the middle-aged have a careworn,
household drudge appearance; the girls, well haired and
fresh-looking ; the children, en masse, unhealthy and ugly.
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