Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/321

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THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ

we could journey together. This was an agreeable surprise, but a much less agreeable surprise was it when in the coupé in which we took seats we found ourselves directly opposite to Professor Lassen of the University of Bonn, who knew me. We were greatly startled. Professor Lassen looked at me with evident astonishment, but as Jacobi and I began to chat and laugh as other young men would have done with apparent unconcern, the good orientalist probably thought that he was mistaken and that I could not possibly be the malefactor whom I resembled in appearance. On the 11th of August I arrived at Berlin. My passport, bearing the name of my cousin, Heribert Jüssen, and fitting me admirably in the personal description, was in excellent order, as the passports of political offenders venturing upon dangerous ground usually are, and thus I had no difficulty in entering Berlin, the gates and railroad stations of which were supposed to be closely watched by an omniscient police bent upon arresting or turning away all suspicious characters. Without delay I looked up some student friends who had been with me members of the Burschenschaft Franconia at the university of Bonn, and they gave me a hearty welcome, although they were not a little astonished to see me suddenly turn up in Berlin. They were discreet enough not to ask me for what purpose I had come, and thus made it easy for me to keep my own secret. Two of them, who occupied a small apartment on the Markgrafen Strasse, invited me to share their quarters; and as I went out and in with my friends the police officers on that beat no doubt regarded me as one of the university students, a good many of whom lived in that neighborhood.

It was at that period customary in Berlin, and perhaps it is now, that the tenants of apartment houses were not furnished with latchkeys for the street doors, but that such keys were

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