THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
might be you.” I replied that this could not be, as at that period I was not in Germany. “Besides,” I added,—a little impudently perhaps,—“would you not have had me arrested as a malefactor?” “Oh,” he exclaimed with a good-natured laugh, “you mistake me. I would not have done such a thing. You mean on account of that Kinkel affair. Oh, no! I rather liked that. And if it were not highly improper for His Majesty's Minister and the Chancellor of the North-German Confederacy, I should like to go with you to Spandau and have you tell me the whole story on the spot. Now let us sit down.” He pointed out to me an easy-chair close to his own and then uncorked a bottle which stood with two glasses on a tray at his elbow. “You are a Rhinelander,” he said, “and I know you will relish this.” We touched glasses, and I found the wine indeed very excellent. “You smoke, of course,” he continued, “and here are some good Havanas. I used to be very fond of them, but I have a sort of superstitious belief that every person is permitted to smoke only a certain number of cigars in his life, and no more. I am afraid I have exhausted my allowance, and now I take to the pipe.” With a burning strip of paper, called in German “Fidibus,” he lighted the tobacco in the porcelain bowl of his long German student pipe and presently blew forth huge clouds of smoke.
This done, he comfortably leaned back in his chair and said: “Now tell me, as an American Republican and a Forty-eighter of the revolutionary kind, how the present condition of Germany strikes you. I would not ask you that question,” he added, “if you were a privy-counsellor (a Geheimrath), for I know what he would answer. But you will tell me what you really think.” I replied that I had been in the country only a few weeks and had received only superficial impressions, but I had become sensible of a general atmosphere of newly inspired
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