of the country. It acted as a damper to my sanguine
expectations of a rapid and highly successful career.
The northern part of William Street, in which the Hotel Constanz was situated, was, in those days, a succession of hotels, boarding-houses, and beer-houses, and hence a centre of attraction for my countrymen. At the upper end of the street stood the Hotel Shakspere, then kept by one Fickler, a fat, jovial Boniface, who had, however, followed at home the more honorable profession of barrister and politician. He had taken a leading part in the Baden revolt, as a member of the revolutionary executive committee. His hostelry was much larger than ours, and was also a popular rendezvous for South Germans, who crowded it on Sundays to overflowing. But the character of the house was low, and it harbored adventurers of both sexes and of all nationalities. Some of the other William Street places represented a still lower grade of entertainment, being nothing less than vulgar concert-halls with suspicious-looking female attendants. Among the inmates of our house, too, some unsavory scandals broke out, and I began to feel decidedly uncomfortable in such surroundings and longed to get away from them. For two weeks I followed eagerly and faithfully every clew in my hunt for employment, but without the least result. The Bavarian consul had an average of twenty applicants for each of the few positions he heard of in the course of a year. I could have had a clerkship with mercantile wholesale and retail firms if I had had a commercial training and known English. My inability, too, to give references prevented me from getting the unfilled places from employers upon whom my earnest appeals and readiness to do any work made an impression. My disqualifications narrowed the circle of possibilities around me every day. Under the impulse of the rapid decrease of my small fund, I tried to get a place as helper in a drug-store or restaurant, and finally even as a waiter in a beer-hall. But my “greenness” or recent arrival in
