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Updated: May 11, 2025
I may mention as a further proof of the different treatment which awaits the holder of the workman’s wander-book, as compared with the bearer of a passport, that on attending at the police office, Alcibiade and myself were at once called into the bureau, and our duly viséd passports handed to us with great politeness, while our companions were left to cool their heels in a stone paved hall, till the officials could find time to attend to them.
As I improved in the practice of my new branch of business, I gained additions to my wages, till I received nine gulden, eighteen shillings, a week; a sum certainly much above the average pay. Alcibiade and I lodged in a narrow slip of a room, the last of a suite of three, on the first floor of a house, or rather conglomerate of houses, in the Neudegger Gasse, Josephstadt.
Here three of our companions, Alcibiade, the Viennese silversmith, and one of the Lübeckers, were unable to proceed further on foot, and took places in the “fast coach;” while “Hannibal” and myself tramped the remaining twenty miles which lay between us and Brünn, the capital of Moravia.
Unfortunately, after three months’ stay there came word from Paris requiring his presence by a certain day at the military court of the department of Seine et Oise, to which, being a native of Argenteuil, he belonged, to draw for the conscription. Alcibiade was too good a Frenchman to hesitate about obeying this summons, or even to murmur at the sacrifice it demanded of him.
As I was to start at six in the morning, the Herr rose earlier than was his wont, prepared for me with his own hands a cup of hot coffee, kissed me on both cheeks, and wished me God speed. My stay in Berlin was limited to six weeks. It would have been longer, but that Alcibiade had set his heart upon tramping to Vienna at the end of that period; and I was pledged to accompany him.
On the morrow I presented a letter of recommendation, from my good genius Alcibiade, to one of the principal jewellers in the city, and felt inexpressibly happy on being at once taken into employment. I spent two delightful months in Leipsic. The pay was better than in Hamburg, but the living worse. My wages were four dollars—twelve shillings per week—and board and lodging.
Alcibiade and I, who had passports, were not called upon to show the condition of our finances, but our three companions, possessing only wander-books, an inferior kind of pass which marks the holder as a simple workman wholly dependent on his labor, were called upon to exhibit a sum equal to at least ten shillings each.
Does he not lisp like a child, and his father sell sausages in the stadt?” “Donnerwetter! Ja!” This may not appear to be of much importance, but to me it is everything; for upon the discovery of this vender of sausages depends my meeting with my best and only friend in Berlin, Alcibiade Tourniquet, of Argenteuil, the Frenchman before mentioned. It is at least a strange coincidence.
In spite of my cap and blouse, it is evident that I bear some national peculiarity about me, at once readable to the keen eyes of the Jew; and upon this point, I remember that my friend Alcibiade, of Argenteuil, jeweller, once expressed himself to me thus: “You may always distinguish an Englishman,” said he, “by two things: his trousers and his gait.
Alcibiade at once furnished the means of meeting this new difficulty, as, indeed, of every other connected with our finances at this period, and we consoled ourselves with the assurance that one of us at least was in employment.
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