He paid for the cab while the ladies were walking slowly a-head, and gave a fee to make sure that the charioteer would safely deposit the trunks at the hotel; but as he was turning back to the station to buy the map the cab-driver called out—
“Thank you kindly, Herr Judge!”
That good gentleman was perceptibly taken aback; he cast a suspicious glance behind him,—there stood the porter who had addressed him in like manner, and the two men were grinning diabolically.
“Aha,” said the judge to himself, “that fellow noticed that his foolish speech vexed me, and now they are having a laugh at me in company. I suppose that’s Berlin humour, and it has got to be endured!”
In possession of a Berlin town-map, which rivalled a moderate-sized bed-screen in size, the judge hastened to join his ladies, who had been caught by a shop window in the Friedrichstrasse as securely as flies caught in a fly-trap.
“That’s right,” said the judge indulgently, “take your time looking at these things. Where you are as utterly unknown as we are here, there is no harm in looking at show-windows.”
He thereupon gave the objects in the window a close inspection.
“Well, Herr Schwarz, what is it that’s taking your fancy?” suddenly cried a shrill voice, and a shoemaker’s apprentice with undisguised mirth in his rogue’s visage slipped by him laughing.
The judge was speechless.
“This is getting worse and worse!” he exclaimed; “there’s something wrong here! Come, children, this is positively uncanny. This looks like the artful device of some scoundrel. Let us hurry up and go to the hotel. The next time any one calls me Herr Judge or Herr Schwarz, it will be the worse for him!”