This agreeable function concluded, I drove off to the Police Commissary about our passport. The "authorities" had finished the duties of the day. The bureau was closed. I asked where the "authorities" lived, and was told the street and the number. I went there, but the "authorities" were at their café. They liked "their dominos and their beer;" and why should they not have their weaknesses?
I hastened to the café; not one of those brilliantly decorated and lighted establishments where foreigners of all nations foregather, but a dim-looking, musty, sanded-floored, smoke-dried den, filled with a company to suit. There was that mysterious half-light, and that low whispering sound which seemed to form a fit atmosphere for spies and eavesdroppers, of which I need scarcely tell you government officials are composed.
By the guidance of the waiter, I reached the table where the Herr von Schureke was seated at his dominos. He was a beetle-browed, scowling, ill-conditioned-looking gent of about fifty, who had a trick of coughing a hard dry cough between every word he uttered.
"Ah," said he, after. I explained the object of my visit, "you want your passport. You wish to leave Baden, and you come here, to give your orders to the Polizey Beamten as if you were the Grand-Duke!"
I deprecated this intention in my politest German; but he went on.
"Es geht nicht"—literally, "It 's no go "—"my worthy friend. We are not the officials of England. We are Badenere. We are the functionaries of an independent sovereign. You can't bully us here with your line-of-battle ships, your frigates, and bomb-boats."
"No. Gott bewahr!" echoed the company; "that will do elsewhere,—but Baden is free!"
The enthusiasm, the sentiment evoked brought all the guests from the several tables to swarm around us.
I assured the meeting that Cobden and Co. were not more pacifically minded than I was; that as to anything like threat, menace, or insolence towards the Grand-Duchy, it never came within thousands of miles of my thoughts; that I came to make the civilest of requests, in the very humblest of manner; and if by ill-luck the distinguished functionary I had the honor to address should not deem either the time opportune, or the place suitable—
"You'll make it an affair for your House of Commons," broke he in.