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Show GERMAN POTATOES OF POOR QUALITY Much of Crop Dried and Converted Into Flour to Prevent Spoiling1. BUTTER MORE SCARCE ; Farmer Proposes to Furnish Product if Purchaser Will Pay for Cow. i By International News Service ; Correspondent. BERLIN, Sept. 16 Germany has i now finished her potato harvest and, as far as quantity goes, it is said to 1 be abundant, but the quality is rather inferior, owing to the wet summer, and i this causes some anxiety, as the poorer grades of potatoes will not keep well, onseqiiently, the greater part of these will be dried and converted into flour as quickly as possible. In the meantime we are now. getting a larger allowance of potatoes than before; be-fore; that is to say, nine pounds a week. We are also getting a trifle more meat, but only one egsr, instead of two, a week on each bread ticket. Faces around the German dinner tables ta-bles would look more cheerful, however, if it were possible to get a little butter to eat With t"he eternal potatoes, but that commodity continues as scarce as ever and the Berliner Tageblatt has some very amusing revelations to make in connection with this scarcity. Butter Price Rises. Referring to a now famous case of a Dutch onion merchant who supplied many wealthy Berlin families with but i ter at the rate of nine pounds for $11.25, it savs that this case has been beaten by the advertisement of a Neumark farmer, which ran as follows: i Butter will be delivered on paying pay-ing for a cow and money for fodder. fod-der. The purchase of the cow will be attended by the Doniaene FA-wardshof, FA-wardshof, near Grauow, Neumark. People wrho inquired into this offer received by return mail the farmer's conditions. First of all, $875 must be sent for the purchase of the cow; which would, of -course, belong to the customer; then an allowance of 60 cents a day, to be paid promptly at the end of each month. For all this tile customer was to receive three pounds of butter a week! In other words, he was to pay in a year a little more than $1100 and get ln(J pounds of butter, and, of course, have his cow. Butter is dear here, but not quite dear enough for that, and I imagine that the farmer has not lost many cows from his herd. Everything Scarce. The food situation here might perhaps per-haps be summed up in the words: Ger-'many Ger-'many has everything, but she has not enough of anything. A housewife who hag money enough may still manage to get everything she needs in the quantities which regulations regula-tions allow, but she must then keep a special servant, whose only duty should be to attend the purenases and who haa her hands full at that. Getting up at dawn, in order to be somewhere near the front end of the line, she would go to the butcher shop and about 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning morn-ing she would, as a rule, get the allowance allow-ance of meat to which the family is entitled. en-titled. In the same manner she would be able to get bread, lard, butter and soap at various hours, according to her luck, and when she had carried everything every-thing home she would have to attend to the getting of the food tickets for the following day. Plenty at Hotels. Of course, it is not everybody who can afford to keep a special servant for this purpose, and so in most cases people, peo-ple, rather than wait for hours in heat or rain for food, make up their minds to do now without meat, now without bread, now again without lard or butter. but-ter. This again means that about one-third one-third of all tickets are not used and the consumption is kept down. Of course, this does not apply to the hotels, ho-tels, where it is possible to get anything any-thing you want if you are prepared to pay the price, which, by the way, is rarely exorbitant in consideration of the circumstance?. There is. for instance, in Kochstrasse a restaurant which was opened a little more than a month ago and which is catering to the bourgeoisie and civil officials. of-ficials. It is a most attractive little place; the rooms are all white; there are always flowers on the tables, and the waitresses are neat, pretty and expert ex-pert in their profession. I had a midday dinner there the other oth-er day, which cost me only 15 cents and which consisted of a good, clear vegetable soup, ox tongue, boiled with potatoes, and a semolina pudding. This is one of the show places of Berlin, Ber-lin, however, ami when it was opened at least one minister and several high , officials were present. It is open only 1 from 1 in the afternoon until 7 in the I evening and is strictly temperance. I |