THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
just as if they had expected me. Their surprise was no less than mine. When I jumped down among them, as if I had dropped from the clouds, they hardly trusted their eyes. They had heard nothing of my escape from Rastatt. Neither had they found my name in the newspapers that gave an account of the revolutionary officers imprisoned in the casemates. Nobody had been able to tell them about me. Thus they had come to believe that I had been lost, perhaps in one of the last engagements, perhaps in an attempt to pass the Prussian lines. As they now saw me before them, alive and well, there was no end to their exclamations of astonishment.
Before evening I was lodged in the house of a baker's widow, in the Dorf Enge, a suburb of Zürich. Strodtmann found quarters in a neighboring inn. My other friends lived near by in the house of the schoolmaster. All this was very convenient and comfortable, although extremely simple. While Strodtmann was with me my thoughts moved in the atmosphere of the old conditions and surroundings, and my sojourn in Zürich appeared almost like part of a student's jaunt. But ten days later my dear good friend returned to Bonn, and what now began for me was the life of a refugee in its true reality. I had not become quite conscious of it all when the illness, which had threatened in Dornachbruck and had then been interrupted by the happy meeting with Strodtmann, developed into a violent fever, which kept me in bed two weeks. The village physician, as well as the baker's widow and her daughter, took care of me, and after a time I fully recovered. But when I rose from my bed I found myself in a strange world. It came over me that I had absolutely nothing to do. My first impulse was to look for a regular occupation. But soon I convinced myself that a young man like myself, who might have given lessons in Latin, Greek or
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