Too much Postcard.

The postcard craze is dying out in Germany—the land of its birth—I am told.  In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all.  The German when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in life.  The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the postcards he had sent.  Then it was he began to enjoy his trip.

“What a charming old town!” the German tourist would exclaim.  “I wish I could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel and have had a look round.  Still, it is pleasant to think one has been there.”

“I suppose you did not have much time?” his friend would suggest.

“We did not get there till the evening,” the tourist would explain.  “We were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had had our breakfast, it was time to leave again.”

He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top.

“Sublime! colossal!” he would cry enraptured.  “If I had known it was anything like that, I’d have stopped another day and had a look at it.”

It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in a Schwartzwald village.  Leaping from the coach they would surge round the solitary gendarme.

“Where is the postcard shop?”  “Tell us—we have only two hours—where do we get postcards?”

The gendarme, scenting Trinkgeld, would head them at the double-quick: stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter Frauen gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all propriety, slim Fräulein clinging to their beloved would run after him.  Nervous pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways, careless loiterers would be swept into the gutter.

In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin.  The cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong men, would rend the air.  The German is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast.  A woman would pounce on a tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray would be snatched from her.  She would burst into tears, and hit the person nearest to her with her umbrella.  The cunning and the strong would secure the best cards.  The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations.  Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and—sucking stumpy pencils—write feverishly.  A hurried meal would follow.  Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might happen to be.