who occupy rented rooms in connection with the families of the city; from ten to one o'clock servant-girls, with pitchers in their hands and immense bunches of keys hanging to their apron-strings, are seen running to and from the neighboring beer-houses thick as butterflies floating in a summer sun, and seem far more as if on business requiring haste. No room is sought for renting without an inquiry as to the quality of the beer of the neighborhood; and the landlady feels that her chances for a tenant are exceedingly slim, if she cannot furnish a satisfactory recommendation in this respect. Scarcely a house in the city is thirty steps from where the article can be had. The places fitted up with seats and tables for drinking accommodate from twenty to five hundred persons, and even one thousand or more in summer, when a garden is generally prepared with seats for the purpose. At these larger places, music is often provided, and ladies are frequently found lending the charm and solace of their presence, and sometimes a good deal more, to the other sex, in this self-denying work, in which the men have generally been the great burden-bearers. But the greatest crowds of real beer-drinkers go to another class of houses,—that is, the breweries themselves, where rooms are always fitted up for drinking. Of these the Court Brewery is perhaps in highest repute, and is at least a great curiosity. I visited it three or four times during a six years' residence in the city, and always in company with others who wished to see the lions of the place, and for the same reason that would have taken us to see a menagerie. Why did the monks never think of applying to such places the figure by which they protested against the introduction of coffee, "the fumes of hell"? The smoke of five hundred cigars or pipes rising to a ceiling which had been thus smoked for centuries,—the hoarse hum of five hundred voices uttering the German gutturals from tongues thickened by the use of beer, and floating heavily through an atmosphere of densest smoke, dimming the lights and turning all into an indefinite and uniform brown color,—this may indeed be a picture of Elysium to some minds, but to ours it is not. I never found a vacant seat there, nor felt a desire to occupy one, had there been such. Stone mugs of double the size of the common glasses are used, perhaps to save servants' labor in drawing, which is no small matter, as a barrel of beer lasts not more than ten minutes at the height of the drinking-time of the evening.
None of the drinking-places in the city are filled until evening. In the afternoon many take their walks into the suburbs, and turn aside where a glass may be had. On all holidays the whole city is adrift, much of it in the surrounding country, and most of this drift lodges against the suburban beer-houses. In summer evenings there are frequent entertainments, some provided by the government,—as one every Saturday evening from six to seven o'clock, from May to November, a mile from the city, in the English Garden, where sometimes two thousand persons may be in attendance, to hear the royal bands play. It is presumed that there will always be a considerable number among these who will not be able to stand it an hour without beer, and a beneficent provision is made for such,—seats and tables for at least five hundred persons being there provided, and often filled, so that some must drink standing.
The regularity with which the men of Munich bring themselves around to the same place at about the same time of day, especially if that place is a beer-house, is remarkable,—indeed, amusing. A gentleman residing in Berlin, where this everlasting beer-drinking does not prevail, mentioned to me, as one of the most ludicrous occurrences of his life, an invitation which he once received to visit a Munich professor whose acquaintance he had made in Berlin. The professor told him, that, in case he should arrive in Munich after a certain hour of the day, he must go directly to the Court Brewery, and would find him there. We do
