. German life in town and country . , opening up thefiner outlooks, protecting dangerous spots, pro-viding shelters and seats, publishing maps, routecharts, and guide-books, and generally makingthe way of the tourist as plain and easy aspossible. One knows how these important services aredone—or not done—for strangers in picturesqueand hilly England. Generally, the initiative isleft to local government bodies, which seldomgo beyond the provision of a couple of benchesin the village street, and which regard the mak-ing of passable foot-roads and the erection ofguide-posts as trivialities too in
. German life in town and country . , opening up thefiner outlooks, protecting dangerous spots, pro-viding shelters and seats, publishing maps, routecharts, and guide-books, and generally makingthe way of the tourist as plain and easy aspossible. One knows how these important services aredone—or not done—for strangers in picturesqueand hilly England. Generally, the initiative isleft to local government bodies, which seldomgo beyond the provision of a couple of benchesin the village street, and which regard the mak-ing of passable foot-roads and the erection ofguide-posts as trivialities too insignificant fortheir attention. In Germany these things arecertainly done better. There is probably no dis-trict frequented to any degree which has notbeen made so easy of access that wayfaring men,even fools (which, alas, many are) need not errtherein. There are large and wealthy clubs forthe Harz Mountain district, for the Black Forest,the Taunus, Saxon Switzerland, the ThuringianForest, the Riesengebirge, the Erzgebirge, the. A BLACK FOREST PEASANT GIRLC. I ley den Pleasures and Pastimes 225 Bavarian Alps and Tyrol, and a score of otherwell-known districts, not to speak of a greatnumber of small clubs which do the same serv-ice for districts out of the beaten track oftouristdom. Clubs which have charge of wideareas, or areas difficult and costly to work, di-vide themselves into Sections, of which asingle club may have as many as eighty, eachwith its special tasks and its special roll of mem-bers, whose annual subscriptions—from one tofive shillings, as the case may be—are devotedin part to local, in part to general purposes. Ican myself speak from experience of most of thedistricts which have been named, and thoughthe facilities for orienfirung are naturally un-equal, they are better in the least efficient casethan those that exist, say, in the Welsh mount-ains or the English Lake district. The systemof road-marking is often very primitive,—perhapsnothing more than
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