CHAPTER III.

London, 5th June.

At length, dearest Gedike, I am again settled, as I have now got my trunk and all my things from the ship, which arrived only yesterday.  Not wishing to have it taken to the Custom House, which occasions a great deal of trouble, I was obliged to give a douceur to the officers, and those who came on board the ship to search it.  Having pacified, as I thought, one of them with a couple of shillings, another came forward and protested against the delivery of the trunk upon trust till I had given him as much.  To him succeeded a third, so that it cost me six shillings, which I willingly paid, because it would have cost me still more at the Custom House.

By the side of the Thames were several porters, one of whom took my huge heavy trunk on his shoulders with astonishing ease, and carried it till I met a hackney coach.  This I hired for two shillings, immediately put the trunk into it, accompanying it myself without paying anything extra for my own seat.  This is a great advantage in the English hackney coaches, that you are allowed to take with you whatever you please, for you thus save at least one half of what you must pay to a porter, and besides go with it yourself, and are better accommodated.  The observations and the expressions of the common people here have often struck me as peculiar.  They are generally laconic, but always much in earnest and significant.  When I came home, my landlady kindly recommended it to the coachman not to ask more than was just, as I was a foreigner; to which he answered, “Nay, if he were not a foreigner I should not overcharge him.”

My letters of recommendation to a merchant here, which I could not bring with me on account of my hasty departure from Hamburgh, are also arrived.  These have saved me a great deal of trouble in the changing of my money.  I can now take my German money back to Germany, and when I return thither myself, refund to the correspondent of the merchant here the sum which he here pays me in English money.  I should otherwise have been obliged to sell my Prussian Fredericks-d’or for what they weighed; for some few Dutch dollars which I was obliged to part with before I got this credit they only gave me eight shillings.

A foreigner has here nothing to fear from being pressed as a sailor, unless, indeed, he should be found at any suspicious place.  A singular invention for this purpose of pressing is a ship, which is placed on land not far from the Tower, on Tower Hill, furnished with masts and all the appurtenances of a ship.  The persons attending this ship promise simple country people, who happen to be standing and staring at it, to show it to them for a trifle, and as soon as they are in, they are secured as in a trap, and according to circumstances made sailors of or let go again.