Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/377

 eleven years, would again put my foot on German soil, and then not as a German, but as the Minister of the United States of America to Spain on my return to my new home, and that Kinkel would have to wait until, after the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, the former Prince of Prussia and commander of the forces that had taken Kinkel prisoner near Rastatt, now king and president of the North-German Confederation, would open to him once more, by an amnesty, the door of the Fatherland!

We did not quit the deck until it was dark. The cabin of the schooner was very small. Its first aspect destroyed in me a fond imagining. I had until then only once seen a seagoing ship, a brig, which at the time when I attended the gymnasium had been brought from Holland up the Rhine and anchored near Cologne; but I could see that ship only from the outside. My conception of the interior of the ship I had derived from novels and descriptions of maritime wars which I had read as a boy, and so the main cabin of a ship stood before my eyes as a spacious room well-fitted out with furniture and the walls decorated with trophies of muskets and pistols and cutlasses. Of all this there was nothing in the cabin of the “Little Anna.” It measured hardly more than eight feet between the two berths, one on each side, and in the other direction hardly more than six. It was so low that Kinkel, standing upright, touched the ceiling with his head. In the center there was a little table screwed to the floor, and behind it a small sofa covered with black haircloth; just large enough to hold Kinkel and me, sitting close together. Above the table was suspended a lamp which during the night faintly illumined the room. The berths, which had been hastily prepared for us, were a foot or two above the floor and open, so that when we were in bed we could see one another. These arrangements appeared to be