Hohenkammer, like the majority of Bavarian towns, was a strictly Catholic community. The women, from the barefoot kitchen servant to the highest lady of the village, had slipped quietly off to church while their husbands gathered in the _Gasthaus_, and the latter were now showing their respect for the ceremony they had attended by proxy. They sat erect, without a bowed head among them, but in the motionless silence of “living statues,” except that toward the end, as if in protest that their good crony, the village priest, should take undue advantage of his position and prolong their pose beyond reason with his persistent tolling, several squirmed in their seats, and two, possibly the free-thinkers of the community, hawked and spat noisily and what seemed a bit ostentatiously. As the ringing ceased, each clumsily crossed himself rather hastily, slapped his hat back upon his head, and the buzz of conversation rapidly rose again to its previous volume.
A brilliant, almost tropical sun, staring in upon me through flimsy white cotton curtains, awoke me soon after five. Country people the world over have small patience with late risers, and make no provision for guests who may have contracted that bad habit. My companions of the night before had long since scattered to their fields when I descended to the _Gastzimmer_, veritably gleaming with the sand-and-water polish it had just received. The calmly busy landlady solicitously inquired how I had slept, and while I forced down my “breakfast” of _Ersatz_ coffee and dull-brown peasant bread she laid before me the inn register, a small, flat ledger plainly bearing the marks of its profession in the form of beer and grease stains on its cover and first pages. I had been mistaken in supposing that Bavaria’s change to a republic had dispensed with that once important formality. In fact, I recall but one public lodging on my German journey where my personal history was not called for before my departure. But there was nothing to have hindered me from assuming a fictitious identity. When I had scrawled across the page under the hieroglyphics of previous guests the half-dozen items required by the police, the hostess laid the book away without so much as looking at the new entry. My bill for supper, lodging, “breakfast,” and four pints of beer was five marks and seventy-two pfennigs, and the order-loving _Frau_ insisted on scooping out of her satchel the last tiny copper to make the exact change before she wished me good day and a pleasant journey.