My arrival in Berlin at one o'clock in the morning, dirty, clothes frayed and torn, and my exchequer so low that I could not afford even a "groschen" (two and a half cents) for a street-car ride, was sorrier, if that be possible than had been the journey from Bremen. One thing I had carefully preserved, however, my mother's address. Asking and feeling my way, laughed at by night street hawks and workmen, and watched suspiciously by policemen, I finally found the house. It was two o'clock in the morning now. The _portier_ answered my ring at the street door. I told him a tale such as he had probably never heard before nor will ever hear again, but my success was probably due more to my obvious foreign nationality than to the story. He knew that my people were foreigners, and he knew so little else of any account, as I learned later, that, in spite of my looks, he doubtless reasoned that Americans are permitted all kinds of eccentricities, and that I was what I claimed to be: a ship's engineer on short shore-leave with his luggage lost in transit. A lame "ghost story" at best, no matter how well delivered, but it won in my case. "Well, I'll go up with you and see what the madame says," he finally declared, and up we marched, the good man looking at me furtively under his brows every now and then, evidently wondering whether or not he was making an awful mistake. My mother answered our ring. "Who is there?" she asked in German, accustomed to the nocturnal calls of the telegraph messengers. I forgot my grammar, my looks, everything in fact except that on the other side of that door was one human being most likely to give me a night's lodging and to forgive. "It's me!" I replied in English. The door opened, the _portier_ was given his fee, and I entered a home which, next to the old brown house in our Middle West, has done more to make home seem worth while than any other that I have known. CHAPTER IX UNTER DEN LINDEN