Everything that begs and cringes in any nationality that I have ever known was present in that miserable boy's manner and voice. But he was a wanderer like myself, and I had a twenty-pfennig piece that I could just barely spare. He saw me feel in my pocket and hesitate. "For the sake of America," he whined, and foolish sentimentalist that I was, I gave him the money, although he already had more than I did. He said that the five cents was necessary to complete his evening fund for supper and lodging. I refer to this lad because he is typical of so many would-be Americans in distress, and on account of his utter lack of Road fellowship in bothering me—poorer than he was—when a complete townful of Germans was staring him in the face. The international Road is shamefully disgraced by these unscrupulous vagabonds.
My arrival in Berlin at one o'clock in the morning, dirty, clothes frayed and torn, and my exchequer so low that I could not afford even a "groschen" (two and a half cents) for a street-car ride, was sorrier, if that be possible than had been the journey from Bremen. One thing I had carefully preserved, however, my mother's address. Asking and feeling my way, laughed at by night street hawks and workmen, and watched suspiciously by policemen, I finally found the house. It was two o'clock in the morning now.
The portier answered my ring at the street door. I told him a tale such as he had probably never heard before nor will ever hear again, but my success was probably due more to my obvious foreign nationality than to the story. He knew that my people were foreigners, and he knew so little else of any account, as I learned later, that, in spite of my looks, he doubtless reasoned that Americans are permitted all kinds of eccentricities, and that I was what I claimed to be: a ship's engineer on short shore-leave with his luggage lost in transit. A lame "ghost story" at best, no matter how well delivered, but it won in my case.
"Well, I'll go up with you and see what the madame says," he finally declared, and up we marched, the good man looking at me furtively under his brows every now and then, evidently wondering whether or not he was making an awful mistake. My mother answered our ring.
"Who is there?" she asked in German, accustomed to the nocturnal calls of the telegraph messengers. I forgot my grammar, my looks, everything in fact except that on the other side of that door was one human being most likely to give me a night's lodging and to forgive.
"It's me!" I replied in English. The door opened, the portier was given his fee, and I entered a home which, next to the old brown house in our Middle West, has done more to make home seem worth while than any other that I have known.