He lived among his people and generally he farmed his own lands.

There was little of the luxury of an English country-house or the refinement of the French noblesse; he would 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.