or
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 depot, 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 even