The man seemed to harbour no suspicions, and, having sent to inquire if I could be accommodated, he added, “I can guess what you are.” I must confess I thought this was coming to rather too close quarters. The position became critical, but I was obliged to humour the moment, and I asked him to guess. To my joy and surprise he replied, “You are a cloth merchant, travelling to procure customers.” I told him that I admired his penetration, and he seemed very much pleased at his cleverness in discovering, not only what I was, but why and wherefore I was travelling. I paid him my bill, which was rather moderate. He provided the cloth merchant with a kind of voiture, which could, he said, carry me only six leagues. This was excellent fortune—exactly what I wished, as there was no place on the road of any consequence within that short distance. Had I been obliged to take it on to Friburg, I intended to have made an excuse, and to have stopped at some village short of that town.
We soon agreed about the price, and I got into this substitute for a carriage; the proprietor was postilion; it was an open machine made of twigs woven together, and forming a rude wicker-work. The morning was thick, with a drizzling rain. I borrowed a greatcoat from the landlord, and off we set—a great change was this in my mode of travelling! I had several turnpikes to pay, and I confess I was alarmed that the gatekeepers might ask for my passport at some of these barrières; but I was agreeably disappointed, my honest driver observing to them that I was, ein Franschose, going to Basle, which proved sufficient for them and very gratifying to me.
At about six o’clock in the evening we stopped at a very respectable-looking village; my conductor made me understand he was going to leave me there, and that I was but three leagues from Friburg. I discharged him, and went to a genteel tavern. They sent for a man who could speak French, to inform them what I wished to have. A very gentleman-like person made his appearance, and I apprehended in the beginning it might be the mayor, but my fears were without foundation. Owing to this gentleman’s goodness in explaining matters, I got a private apartment and a good supper, and went to bed, very happy and comfortable at not having been asked any question. In the morning I arose betimes and ordered breakfast. The genteel interpreter evidently took me for a gentleman, for he came to ask me if, after breakfast, I would want a carriage. I could not help smiling at the question, when I reflected on my scampering amongst the cattle over Kehl bridge only two mornings before. I merely replied that, as I had but three leagues to go, I preferred walking. What would I not have given for a carriage, or even for “a lift” on a donkey’s back, or in a dog-cart, if it were strong enough, in the throbbing and aching state of my lacerated feet! But I reflected that it might not be easy, either with my finances, or with my travelling character, to pass through such a town as Friburg in a carriage; and Heaven knows that, at that moment, I would have been most happy to have compromised matters by a certainty of passing through it on foot, or of getting round it in any manner, in the style I had been accustomed to on the other side of the Rhine.
My breakfast was now ready, and when I saw coffee, toast, and eggs on the table-cloth, and thought of my cabbage-stalks and turnips and the mud of only three days ago, my head, I fancied, began to turn, and myself to suspect that what I had read in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments might, after all, have something of truth in it. To me it had long been a novelty to have anything before me that a human being not actually starving could eat.
My gentlemanly interpreter kept me in conversation the whole time, and the part I had to play was to reveal as little—as little of truth, at least—as possible, and to receive as much information as I could, taking very good care to separate the chaff from the wheat. The dialogue sometimes kept me on the tenter-hooks of alarm.
“That is a kind of breakfast, sir, which Englishmen in general like.”
This word, Englishmen, never sounded so unpleasantly in my ears. I thought the fellow was either pumping me, or that he was giving me a hint that he knew or suspected that all was not right; or that he, in fact, had discovered my false colours.
A large piece of toast in my mouth at once gratified appetite and was an excuse for not answering.
“Englishmen,” continued my tormentor, “only differ from you in dipping their toast in their coffee.”
I laconically replied, by an indisputable general principle, “I believe people of all nations like what is good.”