"The devil take this _pious_ Philadelphia!" he exclaimed, indignantly; "they keep Sundays here so strictly, that one daren't so much as peel an apple, and yet all the while there they sit in their rocking-chairs, and calculate and plan, how they shall cheat each other next day. Heaven alone knows all the sects that crawl about here; there are Quakers and methodists, baptists, presbyterians, Millerites, Schulzerites, and Meierites, and Heaven knows what other names the fellows have! A shudder comes over me when I see the gang of thieves, cutting about in snuff-coloured suits." "But the quakers are very plainly dressed," said Werner, taking up their cause; "indeed, 'tis a part of their religion to attire themselves in as quiet a manner as possible." "Certainly," exclaimed Buchenberg; "but is it not strange that they should dress themselves up in a costume which everybody else has long since ceased to wear? The women, too, don't they just coquette in an alarming manner from under their black sun-bonnets of such a very pious cut! Well, then, the town itself!" continued the little man, who had just got into train, "this regularity at last becomes quite unbearable, and one dare not go abroad without a compass. If you inquire of any one in the streets which way you are to get to so-and-so, they don't answer you as reasonable people in other reasonable places would answer: 'You go down yonder, then take the first turning on the right or left as the case may be, go through that street, and then through such another street to the place you wish for;' oh lord, no!--if you ask a Philadelphian your way to ever so near a place, he says directly: 'Oh, you can't miss it; you go from here three streets south, then you turn westward till you come to the fourth, then again two streets south, and it's to the east the third house on the north side.' Now I'll appeal to anybody, isn't it enough to drive one wild?" "Why, the points of the compass are easily remembered," said Helldorf, with a smile. "It happened just the same with me," Werner declared.