United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"You did mention something of the sort," replied Mrs. X. "What is a Kneipe?" "Well, it's a sort of bachelor party, my dear, where the students meet to sing and talk and and smoke, and all that sort of thing, you know." "Oh, well, I hope you will enjoy yourself!" said Mrs. X., who was a nice woman and sensible. "It will be interesting," observed Mr. X. "I have often had a curiosity to see one.
In the thick-sown, business thoroughfare, the BRUHL, they entered a dingy cafe and while Furst chattered with the landlord and BUFFETDAME, with both of whom he was on very friendly terms, Maurice went into the side-room, where the KNEIPE was to be held, and sat down before a long, narrow table, spread with a soiled red and blue-checked tablecloth.
The Kneipe is what we should call a stag party, and can be very harmless or very rowdy, according to its composition. One man invites his fellow- students, a dozen or a hundred, to a cafe, and provides them with as much beer and as many cheap cigars as their own sense of health and comfort may dictate, or the host may be the Korps itself.
At that very table he had drawn his first caricature of Herr Professor Winkelnase, which had been framed and hung up in the "Kneipe" the drinking-hall of his corps; at the same board he had written his thesis for his doctorate, and here again he had penned the notes for his first lecture.
The German student is courtesy itself, and whatever his own state may be, he will see to it that, by some means or another, his guest gets safely home before the morning. But, of course, he cannot be expected to remember addresses. A story was told me of three guests to a Berlin Kneipe which might have had tragic results. The strangers determined to do the thing thoroughly.
But surely there can be no attraction about a blotched and bloated skin and a "bay window" thrown out to an extent threatening to overbalance the whole structure. Yet what else can be expected, when the youngster starts his beer-drinking with a "Fruhschoppen" at 10 a.m., and closes it with a "Kneipe" at four in the morning?
How gloriously the air thickened with tobacco-smoke! What removal of empty bottles and replacing them with full! The Germans were making it a set Kneipe; the Englishmen, unable to drink quite so heroically, were scarce behind in vehemence of debate.
Do you know, pray, that on the last evening, at a KNEIPE in the GOLDENE HIRSCH, he boasted of what you had done for him boasted about everything that had happened between you to a rowdy, tipsy crew? More than that, he gave shameless details, about you going to his room that afternoon " "It's not true, it's not true," repeated Louise, as if she had got these few words by heart.
They took their last man, therefore, to that hotel, passed him over to the night porter, and left him. To return to the address at which the first delivery was made, what had happened there was this. Some eight hours previously had said Mr. X. to Mrs. X.: "I think I told you, my dear, that I had an invitation for this evening to what, I believe, is called a Kneipe?"
Although admission to these unions is generally, and probably always, obtained by ballot, they are not clubs in any ordinary sense of the word. Each has a habitation or lodge, called a Kneipe, or drinking- hall, and a fencing-room, or a share in the use of one, but there is no set of apartments corresponding to a club, nor intended for the same manifold purposes.
Word Of The Day