Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/108

 rooms to be let. My friend Petrasch, who meantime had been matriculated in the university, took one of them. All this promised very satisfactorily.

But then a great misfortune fell upon us. The purchaser of the property in Liblar, with whom my father had made a very imperfect contract, declared that he had become dissatisfied with the arrangement and that he proposed to forfeit the little sum paid in advance, and not take the property. This was a hard blow. My father tried, unsuccessfully, to hold the purchaser to the bargain, and no other purchaser could be found. To return to Liblar was impossible, as my father was then bound to his new arrangements in Bonn. Now the bills of exchange became due, which in anticipation of the money coming to him from the sale in Liblar he had given to his creditors. He could not meet them; the bills were protested, and suddenly I received in Cologne the news that some of the creditors had thrown my father into the debtors' prison. This struck me like a clap of thunder. I ran to the prison house and saw my father behind an iron bar. It was a distressing meeting, but we endeavored to encourage one another as best we could. He explained to me his circumstances, and we considered what might best be done to extricate him from this humiliating situation.

I was then seventeen years old and on the point of passing into the highest class of the gymnasium, but evidently I could no longer remain in Cologne. I hurriedly took leave of my teachers and friends, and devoted myself entirely to the affairs of the family. My uncles would have been glad to assist us, but they themselves were involved in grievous embarrassments. Business matters were entirely foreign and repugnant to me; but necessity is a wonderful schoolmaster, and I felt as if in a day I had grown many years older. After much traveling