"And you would have bought something, sure enough," said the shoemaker, as they turned up the main street.
"What was I to do? he would not let me go."
"Look, here's another clothes-shop, and another Jew inside," said the tailor; "this makes the fifteenth out of thirty-three houses that we have passed; they just do swarm here."
Strolling thus up the street, they came between the sixth and seventh cross streets, opposite to a German tavern, and finding a number of their fellow-countrymen there, they stopped. But these had been some time in America, and so soon as they heard that the four men were new-comers, they set up such a lamentation about bad times, and want of money, that the settlers felt quite hot and uncomfortable.
It is true, that at first they would not give in to these complaints, for what Dr. Normann had told them about the country sounded quite different, but at last, staggered by the testimony of so many bystanders, doubts began to arise in their minds, and the shoemaker said,—rather faint-heartedly, however—
"If one can earn a dollar a day at work, I should think that one might live upon it."
"Yes, if one could get it," replied an old Hanoverian peasant, who, rather ragged, and with pale cheeks, was sitting on a bench before the house, nodding hard with his head at the same time. "But they scarcely pay one twenty-five dollars a month during the harvest, and after that, poor devils may get on again as best they can. They offered me and my two sons six dollars a month; the two boys were obliged to accept it, but I was taken ill, and am eating up nearly all they earn."
"Are they making no railroads, no canals, hereabouts? There's always plenty of money when they are going on."
"Half a dollar a day, and on wet days they don't work. Payments are made monthly in paper money, and if one afterwards loses the fourth part only, one must think one's self lucky."
"But handicraftsmen are well paid here, are they not?" asked the tailor.