The “Emperor” Dead

   Unique Character of the East Side Passes Away

A unique and interesting character, a familiar figure of the East Side of the City, has been lost from our streets with the death of William Hohen lost Thursday in the Pauper Hospital, to which he had been brought as the result of injuries sustained in a street accident at the Lusitania celebration.  Hohen, who was about sixty-five years of age, was an immigrant out of Germany after the troubles of the Great War.  He had been for a year or more a street pedler on the Bowery, where he sold souvenir buttons and various little trinkets.  The old man appears to have been the victim of a harmless hallucination whereby he thought himself a person of Royal distinction and in his fancy converted the box of wares that he carried into Orders of Chivalry and decorations of Knighthood.  The effect of this strange fancy was heightened by an attempt at military bearing which, comic though it was in so old and ragged a figure, was not without a touch of pathos.  Some fancied resemblance to the former Kaiser had earned for Hohen the designation of the “Emperor,” of which he appeared inordinately proud.  But those who knew Hohen by sight assure us that the resemblance to the former ruler of Germany, who with all his faults made a splendid and imposing appearance, was of a purely superficial character.  It would, alas! have been well for the world if the lot of William Hohenzollern had fallen on the lines of the simple and pathetic “Emperor” of the Bowery.

II.—­With the Bolsheviks in Berlin

Two years ago as my readers will remember,—­but of course they don’t,—­I made a secret visit to Germany during the height of the war.  It was obviously quite impossible at that time to disclose the means whereby I made my way across the frontier.  I therefore adopted the familiar literary device of professing to have been transported to Germany in a dream.  In that state I was supposed to be conducted about the country by my friend Count Boob von Boobenstein, whom I had known years before as a waiter in Toronto, to see Germany from within, and to report upon it in the Allied press.

What I wrote attracted some attention.  So the German Government—­feeling, perhaps, that the prestige of their own spy system was at stake—­published a white paper, —­or a green paper,—­I forget which,—­in denial of all my adventures and disclosures.  In this they proved (1) that all entry into Germany by dreams had been expressly forbidden of the High General Command; (2) that astral bodies were prohibited and (3) that nobody else but the Kaiser was allowed to have visions.  They claimed therefore (1) that my article was a fabrication and (2) that for all they knew it was humorous.  There the matter ended until it can be taken up at the General Peace Table.

But as soon as I heard that the People’s Revolution had taken place in Berlin I determined to make a second visit.