Too poor to loiter on the road, having got my passport _viséd_, I again strapped the knapsack to my back, and set out through the long avenues of trees over the long, wet road, through bitter wind and driving rain. Soaked with rain, and shivering with cold, I entered the village of Schöneberg at two o’clock, just after the rain had ceased, as deplorable a figure as a man commonly presents when all the vigour has been washed out of his face, and his clothes hang limp and damp about his body. Wearied to death, I halted at the door of an inn, but was told inhospitably—miserable tramp as I seemed, and was—that “I could go to the next house.” At the next house they again refused me, already humbled, and advised me to go to The Tall Grenadier. That is a house of call for masons. I went to it, and was received there hospitably. My knapsack being waterproof, I could put on dry clothes, and hang my wet garments round the stove, while the uproarious masons—terrible men for beer and music—comforted me with unending joviality. They got into their hands a book of German songs that dropped out of my knapsack, and having appointed a reader, set him upon the table to declaim them. Presently, another jolly mason cried out over a drinking song—declaimed among the others in a loud monotonous bawl—“I know that song;” and having hemmed and tuned his voice a little, broke out into music with tremendous power. The example warmed the others; they began to look out songs with choruses, and so continued singing to the praise of wine and beauty out of my book, until they were warned home by the host. I climbed a ladder to my bedroom, and slept well. The Grenadier was not an expensive hotel, for in the morning when I paid my bill for bed and breakfast, I found that the accommodation cost me fourpence-halfpenny.
Since it is my desire not to fatigue the reader of this uneventful narrative, but simply to illustrate by a few notes drawn from my own experience the life of a German workman on the tramp, I shall now pass over a portion of the road between Hamburg and Berlin in silence. My way lay through Schwerin; from Schöneberg to Schwerin is twenty-six English miles, and we find it a long way. In reckoning distances, the Germans count by “stunden”—_i.e._ hours—and two “stunden” make one German mile. From experience, I should say that five miles English were about equal to one mile German; but they vary considerably. Having spent a night in the exceedingly neat city of Schwerin beside its pleasant waters, and under the protection of the cannon in the antiquated castle overhead, I set out for a walk of twenty miles onward to Ludwigslust. The road was a pleasant one, firm and dry, with trim grass edgings and sylvan seats on either side. The country itself was flat and dull, enlivened only now and then by a fir plantation or a pretty village. Brother tramps passed me from time to time with a cheerful salutation, and at three o’clock I passed within the new brick walls of Ludwigslust; a town dignified as a pleasure seat with a military garrison, a ducal palace, and an English park.