On the following Tuesday, after an imprisonment of, in all, nine days, during which I had never slept without my clothes, I was discharged from the prison. In remembrance of the place, I brought away with me a straw landscape and a bread snuff-box, the works of the prison artist.
On reaching my lodging I looked into my box. It was empty.
“Where are my books and papers?” I asked my landlord.
The police had taken them on the day after my arrest.
“Here they are!” exclaimed my landlord, triumphantly. “I expected the police; I knew you had money somewhere, so I took the liberty of searching until I found it. The police made particular inquiries about your cash, and went away disappointed, taking the other things with them.”
“Hem! Very likely—under pretence of paying your expenses.”
On application to the police of the district, I received the whole of my effects back. One of my books was detained for about a week; a member of the police having taken it home to read, and being, as I apprehend, a slow reader.
It was matter of great astonishment, both to my friends and to the police, that I escaped with so slight a punishment.
My Bohemian landlord in Vienna told me a story of an English nobleman. It may be worth relating, as showing what my landlord, quite in good faith and earnest, believed.
You know, Lieber Herr, said Vater Böhm, there is nothing in the whole Kaiserstadt so astonishing to strangers as our signboards. Those beautiful paintings that you see—Am Graben and Hohe Markt,—real works of art, with which the sign-boards of other countries are no more to be compared, than your hum-drum English music is to the delicious waltzes of Lanner, or the magic polkas of Strauss. Imagine an Englishman, who knows nothing of painting, finding himself all at once in front of one of those charming compositions—pictures that they would make a gallery of in London, but which we can afford to put out of doors; he is fixed, he is dumb with astonishment and delight—he goes mad. Well, Lieber Herr, this is exactly what happened to one of your English nobility. Milor arrived in Vienna; and as he had made a wager that he would see every notability in the city and its environs in the course of three days, which was all the time he could spare, he hired a fiaker at the Tabor-Linie, and drove as fast as the police would let him from church to theatre; from museum to wine-cellar; till chance and the fiaker brought him into the Graben. Milor got out to stretch himself, and to see the wonderful shops, and after a few turns came suddenly upon the house at the sign of the Joan of Arc.