Fritz, however, was not proceeding to any of these newly colonised countries. Like the majority of other Germans who had emigrated before him, he was aiming for “the States,” where, according to the popular idea in Europe, money can be had for nothing in the shape of any expenditure of labour, time, or trouble. Really, the ne’er-do-well and shiftless seem to regard America as a sort of Tom Tiddler’s ground for the idle, the lazy, and the dissolute—although, mind you, Fritz was none of these, having made up his mind to work as hard in the New World as he would have been forced to do in the Old for the fortune he could not win there, and which he had been forced to turn his back on.
Bremerhaven to Southampton; Southampton to Sandy Hook, as he had told his mother; and, in ten days altogether, the ocean steamer he travelled in, one of the North German line, had landed him safely in New York.
Seven years before, when he would have reached the “Empire City” during the height of the Secession War, he might have sold himself to a “bounty jumper,” as the enlisting agents of the northern army were termed, for a nice little sum in “greenback” dollars; now, he found sharpers, or “confidence men,” ready to “sell” him in a similar way—only, that the former rogues would have been satisfied with nothing less than his body and life, as an emigrant recruit for Grant or Sherman’s force; while the present set cared but for his cash, seeking the same with ravenous maw almost as soon as he had landed at Castle Garden!
Fritz had taken a steerage passage, so as to save money; and, being dressed in shabby clothes, in keeping with his third-class ticket, the loafers about the Battery, at the end of Manhattan Island, on which the town of New York is built, thought he was merely an ignorant German peasant whom they might easily impose on. They, however, soon found that he had not been campaigning six months for nothing, and so their efforts at getting him to part with the little capital he had were pretty well thrown away—especially as Fritz, in his anxiety to find some work to do at once, did not “let the grass grow under his feet,” but proceeded up Broadway instead of wasting his time by lounging in the vicinity of the emigrant depôt, as the majority of his countrymen generally do, apparently in the expectation that employment will come in search of them.
Still, he soon discovered that New York was overstocked with just the species of labour he was able to supply.
Of course, if he had been at the pitch of desperation, he might have found a job of some sort to his hand; but, writing and speaking English and French fluently in addition to his native tongue, besides being a good correspondent and book-keeper, he did not feel disposed to throw away his talents on mere manual labour. He had emigrated to “make his fortune,” or, at all events, to achieve a position in which he could hope to build up a home for the dear ones left behind at Lubeck; and there would not be much chance of his accomplishing this by engaging himself out as a day labourer—to assist some skilled carpenter or bricklayer—which was the only work offered him.
“No, sir; nary an opening here!” was the constant reply he met with at every merchant’s office he entered from Wall Street upwards along Broadway until he came to Canal Street; when, finding the shops, or “stores” as the Americans call them, going more in the “dry goods” or haberdashery line, he wended his way back again “down town,” investigating the various establishments lying between the main thoroughfare and the North and East rivers, hoping to find a situation vacant in one of the shipping houses thereabouts.
But, “No, sir; all filled up, I guess,” was still the stereotyped response to his applications, with much emphasis on the “sir”—the majority of the Manhattanese uttering this word, as Fritz thought, in a highly indignant tone, although, as he discovered later on, this was the general pronunciation adopted throughout the States.
“I suppose,” he said to one gentleman he asked, and who was, it seemed to Fritz, the master, or “boss,” of the establishment, from the fact of his lounging back in a rocking chair contiguous to his desk, and balancing his feet instead of his hands on the latter,—“I suppose it’s because I can give no references to former employers here, that all the men I speak to invariably decline my services?”
“No, sirree; I reckon not,” was the reply. “Guess we don’t care a cuss where you come from. We take a man as we find him, for just what he is worth, without minding what he might have been in the old country, or bothering other folks for his ka-racter, you bet! I reckon, mister, you’d better start right away out West if you want work. Book-keepers and sich-like are played out haar; we’re filled up to bustin’ with ’em, I guess!”