There I found no work, and wandered listlessly through the museums and picture-galleries; for a troubled mind is a poor critic in works of art. So I squeezed myself into the Police Court, meaning to leave Berlin, and had the distinction of being beckoned, before my turn out of the reeking mass of applicants for passports, because my clothes had a respectable appearance, and I wore a showy pin in my cravat.
Fairly in Prussia! We have passed the frontier town of Perleberg, and press onward in company with a glovemaker of Berlin, last from Copenhagen, whom we have overtaken on the road towards Wusterhausen.
“Thou wouldst know, good friend, the nature of my prospects in Berlin when I arrive there? Have I letters of recommendation—am I provided in case of the worst? Brother, not so! I am provided for nothing. I dare the vicissitudes of fortune. I had a friend in Hamburg, a Frenchman, who departed thence five months ago for Berlin, under a promise to write to me at the lapse of a month. He has never written, and he is my hope. That is all. Let us go on.”
“I have a cousin,” says the glovemaker, “who is a jeweller in Berlin. I will recommend you to him. His name is Kupferkram.”
“Strange! I knew a Kupferkram in Hamburg; a short, sallow man, with no beard.”
“It cannot be that my cousin was in Hamburg and I not know it. I was there twelve months.”
“Why not? A German will be anywhere in the course of twelve months except where you expect to find him.”
“His name is Gottlob—Gottlob Kupferkram.”
“The very man! Does he not lisp like a child, and his father sell sausages in the stadt?”
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.
We came into the capital of Prussia in the eil-wagen from Wusterhausen. We had tramped the previous day a distance of good two-and-thirty English miles, through a flat, uninteresting country, and being dead beat, had made an anxious bargain with the driver of the “Fast-coach,” to carry us to Berlin for a dollar a-head. It was late in the evening as we rumbled heavily along the dusty road, and through the long vista of thick plantations which skirt the public way as you enter the city from Spandau. We dismounted, cramped and weary, from our vehicle, and my companion, a native of Berlin, unwilling to disturb his friends at that late hour, and in his then travel-worn guise; and I myself being unknown and unknowing in the huge capital, led the way at once to “Our Herberge.”