“I know nothing of it.”
The inquirer is a little man with a thin face, and a voice which might be disagreeable, were it not mellowed by good nature. He tells me, then, that he is a jewel-case maker, and has no doubt that I shall find a ready shelter in the herberge of his trade till the morning, if I am willing to accept of it. It is in the Little Churchyard. In spite of this ominous direction I shake the good man heartily by the hand, and, although I lose him in the darkness and confusion of the railway-station, cling mentally to the Little Churchyard as a passport
to peace and rest. I don’t know how it is that I escape interrogation by the police, but once out of the turmoil of the crowd, I find myself wandering by a deep ditch and the shadowy outline of a high wall, seeking in vain amid the drizzling mist for one of the gates of the city. When almost hopeless of success, a welcome voice inquires my destination; and, under the guidance of a worthy Saxon, I find myself in Kleine Kirche Hof at last. There is the herberge in question, but with no light—welcoming sign!—for it is already ten o’clock, and its guests are all in bed. Dripping with rain, and with a rueful aspect, I prefer my request for a lodging. The “vater” looks dubiously at me out of the corner of one eye, till, having inspected my passport, he brightens up a little, and thinks he can find me a bed, but cannot break through the rules of his house so far as to give me any supper. It is too late.
Lighting a small lantern he leads the way across a stone-paved yard, and, opening one leaf of the folding-doors of a stable at its upper end, inducts me at once into the interior. It also is paved with stones, is small, and is nearly choked up with five or six bedsteads. The vater points to one which happily is as yet untenanted, and says, “Now, make haste, will you? I can’t stop here all night.” Before I have time to scramble into bed we are already in darkness, and no sooner is the door closed than my bed-fellows, who seemed all fast asleep a moment before, open a rattling fire of inquiries as to my parentage, birthplace, trade, and general condition; and having satisfied all this amiable questioning we fall asleep.
We turn our waking eyes upon a miserable glimmering which finds its way through the wooden bars of our stable-door; but it tells us of morning, of life, and of hope, and we rise with a bound, and are as brisk as bees in our summary toilet. With a dry crust of bread and a cup of coffee, we are fortified for our morning’s work. I have a letter of introduction upon Herr Herzlich of the Brühl, at the sign of the Golden Horn, between the White Lamb and the Brass Candlestick. Every house in Leipsic has its sign, and the numbers run uninterruptedly through the whole city, as in most German towns; so that the clown’s old joke of “Number One, London,” if applied to them, would be no joke at all.
I leave the gloomy precincts of Little Churchyard, and descending a slight incline over a pebbly, irregular pavement, with scarcely a sign of footpath, arrive at the lower end of the Brühl. There is a murmur of business about the place, for this
is the first week of the Easter Fair, but there are none of those common sounds usually associated with the name to English ears. No braying of trumpets, clashing of cymbals, or hoarse groaning of gongs; no roaring through broad-mouthed horns, smacking of canvass, or pattering of incompetent rifles. All these vulgar noises belonging to a fair, are banished out of the gates of the city: which is itself deeply occupied with sober, earnest trading.
Leipsic has the privilege of holding three markets in the year. The first, because the most important, is called the Ostermesse, or Easter Fair, and commences on Jubilee Sunday after Easter. It continues for three weeks, and is the great cloth market of the year. The second begins on the Sunday after St. Michael, and is called Michialismesse. It is the great Book Fair, is also of three weeks’ duration, and dates, as does the Easter Fair, from the end of the twelfth century. The New Year’s Fair commences on the First of January, and was established in fourteen hundred and fifty-eight. Curiously enough, the real business of the Fair is negotiated in the week preceding its actual proclamation; it is then that the great sales between manufacturers and merchants, and their busy agents from all parts of the continent, are effected, while the three weeks of the actual Fair are taken up in minor transactions. No sooner is the freedom of the Fair proclaimed than the hubbub begins; the booths, already planted in their allotted spaces—every inch of which must be paid for—are found to be choked up with stock of every description, from very distant countries: while every town and village, within a wide radius, finds itself represented by both wares and customers.
It is not, however, all freedom even at fair time. The guild laws of the different trades, exclusive and jealous as they are, are enforced with the utmost severity. Jews, in general, and certain trades in particular,—shoemakers, for example,—are not allowed the same privileges as the rest; for their liberty to sell is restricted to a shorter period, and woe to the ambitious or unhappy journeyman who shall manufacture, or expose for sale, any article of his trade, either on his own account or for others, if they be not acknowledged as masters by the Guild. Every such article will be seized by the public officers, deposited in the Rathhaus, and severe punishment—in the shape of fines—inflicted on the offender. The last week of the Fair is called the pay-week; the Thursday and Friday in this week being severally pay and assignation days. The traffic at the Easter
Fair, before the establishment of railways, was estimated at forty millions of dollars, but since, by their means, increased facilities of transit between Leipsic and the two capitals, Berlin and Dresden, have been afforded, it has risen to seventy millions of dollars, or ten millions five hundred thousand pounds sterling.