The Corvallis gazette. [volume] (Corvallis, Or.) 1862-1899, 1880-09-03


vice that he had saved my life"
s'Then you did not know that he was
under the log?" asked John.
"Not I. It would, I am afraid, have
been bad day for US both had I.
Life in Germany.
OF course there is no fre-alarm tele-
graph. Alarms must be sent to the po-
lice or to the fire watch in different parts
of the city. Fires, however, like every
thing else in the country, never seem to
be in hurry to burn, and an American
would say that the fire companies were
in no hurry to put them out. The en-
gine is very primitive affair, mounted
on hand car and drawn by few men,
with as much passivity and almost as
much deliberation as if they were going
to a funeral. Arriving at the fire, the en-
gine is lifted from the car, placed on the
ground, and worked by hand. Usually
It is not much larger than garden en-
gine and does not furnish a more power
full stream. I attended with friend a
trial of fire engines in Jena. We both
concluded, in no spirit of exaggeration,
that two or three garden engines could
be obtained from some of our agricul-
tural warehouses which would do quite
as much execution as any OF the engines
we saw To New York or Boston fire.
man the whole exhibition would have
been cold water comedy. But if you
laugh at the fire department you lapse
into instant gravity when German very
properly: .Our fire department. may
not be as good as yours, but still with
significant shrug of the shoulders) we
do not have any Chicago or Boston fires. "
And it is true; there is greater precau-
tion taken against fire than with us. The
building laws are stringent; houses are
built of brick, have immensely thick
walls and seem to be practically fire.
proof. Fires very seldom spread. By
using the pound of prevention the Ger
mans are able to get along with the ounce
of cure With the German fire depart
ment in Boston the city would soon be an
ash heap, but with the German preven-
ton and the American cure it would be
invulnerable.
The cheapness of labor in Germany in
duces prohigacy of time and effort. It
usually takes three men to shoe horse
one to hold the animals head, another
to hold the animals foot, and the third to
put on the animals shoe. If You wish
anything done that one man can do per-
fectly well, you must pay some other
man for looking on. Hyou have one or
two little carpet bags at a railway station,
which you could carry yourself without
any effort but little strength of pride.
of the army of porters that ask to relieve
you two or three must be satisfied. In
Vienna it takes two men and horse to
water the streets. The apparatus seems
to have been contrived-llke some OF our
public Offices at Westinghouse the
One man sits on the box and drives the
water wagon: piece of hose six feet
long issues from the other end, with
sprinkler attached to its nozzle, and q
man following at a dry distance behind
swings the hose back and forth, from
side to side, and effectually clears the
street of pedestrians. Another serious
indictment is that there is q lack of hitch
ing posts. spent nine months in Leip-
sic looking for place to tie horse, and
did not find one. I have never seen
hitching post in Berlin, Munich, Vienna
or Dresden. If they are there the
authorities have taken great pains to con-
ceal them doubt If there is real
genuine hitching post in all Ger
many. The most natural conclusion
of the frivolous punster is that there
are no fast horses there. But the
more exact, if less facetious for the neg
lect of hitching posts is that no one ever
thought of them, or, if the idea oc
Cured, it was probaoly banished as
offering too great temptation to horse
thieves. remember complaining to a
bright and cultivated Saxon lady one
day, after riding horseback, that there
were no hitching posts in the city. I
told her how convenient and pleasant is
was in America to find a standing invita-
ton on the sidewalk whenever you
wished to alight. But don't thieves
steal your horses when you leave them
tied?" she asked in great surprise. And
when told her that many of our doc
tors ride in buggies and carry weight
to anchor their horses to the curbstone,
she was greatly amused and surprised,
and in her opinion American honesty
went up to par. The fact is, however,
that in the present state of German
society there is no need of hitch
ing posts. Such a thing as a light
wagon, or road-wagon or buggy is nm
known. At least never saw but one
buggy there, and that was in Leipsic,
was an American wagon that i walked
up to the owner and said, in the best
English could command after q three
months residence In Germany, where,
if you please, did you get that buggy"
and he told me, in equally good English,
that he brought it from America, and |
that for long time it had astonished the |
natives. This manufacturer, riding |
about from day to day, might have found
q hitching post very convenient, but in |
accordance to the prescribed etiquette of |
the country and the superhuity of labor, |
he always took man with him. But |