Harper's Young People, December 6, 1881 / An Illustrated Weekly

A FRIEND IN NEED IS A FRIEND INDEED.

A few days after my war experience, we moved to Berlin, where Thad and I managed to have a more cheerful time of it, as father allowed us to walk by ourselves as far as we pleased in either direction on Under Ten Lindens, which was the way my brother pronounced the name of the main avenue.
We used to wander up and down this street for hours, watching for Emperor William, although as soon as his carriage came in sight, I always hurried Thad around the nearest corner for fear he might be in the way of somebody who wanted to shoot the Kaiser. So we never saw anything more than the horses' heads, and the sun shining on the helmets of the officers.
I had now become very suspicious of these Germans and their queer customs, so when mother heard from some friends in another town that one of the young fellows in the party had been compelled to join the fire-company because he was over a certain age, and had lived there six months, I determined to keep my eyes open wider than ever.
Yet after all I got mixed up in a dreadful way before I had been in the city a week, and this is how it happened:
One morning Thad and I had walked a little further than usual, when we suddenly came upon a lot of people crowding about the entrance to a large building in a way that was so enticingly suggestive of a circus that we could not resist the temptation to join them.
As the Germans haven't yet invented any outlandish fashion of making figures, it did not take me long to find out the low price of admission from the sign before the door, and telling Thad to keep fast hold of my jacket, I began working my way inside.
I soon found that the crowd was not as dense as it had seemed, and in less than two minutes I had bought my two tickets, and was waiting my turn to pass through the narrow space where a man was taking them up. I gave one to Thad, and as I went in ahead of him, handed my own to the door-keeper, who looked at it and at me, then suddenly seizing me by the shoulders, turned me completely around, at the same time shouting out something that made everybody rush up and stare at me as if they had never seen a boy before.