be up at daybreak to superintend the work in the fields, his wife and
daughters that of the household, talking to the peasants the pleasant
_Platt Deutsch_ of the countryside. Then there would be long rides or
drives to the neighbours' houses; shooting, for there was plenty of deer
and hares; and occasionally in the winter a visit to Berlin; farther
away, few of them went. Most of the country gentlemen had been to Paris,
but only as conquerors at the end of the great war.

They were little disturbed by modern political theories, but were
contented, as in old days, to be governed by the King. It was a
religious society; among the peasants and the nobles, if not among the
clergy, there still lingered something of the simple but profound faith
of German Protestantism; they were scarcely touched by the rationalism
of the eighteenth or by the liberalism of the nineteenth century; there
was little pomp and ceremony of worship in the village church, but the
natural periods of human life--birth, marriage, death--called for the
blessing of the Church, and once or twice a year came the solemn
confession and the sacrament. Religious belief and political faith were
closely joined, for the Church was but a department of the State; the
King was chief bishop, as he was general of the army, and the sanctity
of the Church was transferred to the Crown; to the nobles and peasants,
criticism of, or opposition to, the King had in it something of
sacrilege; the words "by the Grace of God" added to the royal title were
more than an empty phrase. Society was still organised on the old
patriarchal basis: at the bottom was the peasant; above him was the
_gnädiger Herr_; above him, _Unser allergnädigste Herr_, the King, who
lived in Berlin; and above him, the _Herr Gott_ in Heaven.

To the inhabitants of South Germany, and the men of the towns, these
nobles of Further Pomerania, the _Junker_ as they were called, with