Besides, going away from the neighbourhood of ships and quays and the sea would be like cutting adrift every old association with Lubeck and Europe; while, in addition, he had directed his letters from home to be sent to the "Poste Restante, New York," and if he left that city, why he would never hear how Madaleine and his mother were getting on in his absence! So, for days and days he patrolled the town in vain; seeking for work, and finding none.

The place, as his candid informer had said, was filled with clerks like himself in search of employment; and they, linguists especially, were a drug in the market--the cessation of the Franco-German War having flooded the country with foreign labour.
What should he do?
Before making a move, as everybody advised him, he determined to await the next mail steamer.

This would bring him a letter from home, in answer to the one he had written, immediately on landing, telling of his safe arrival in the New World.

He was dying to have, if only, a line from those dear ones he had left with a good-bye in the Gulden Strasse, recounting all that had happened since he had started from home--his passage across the Atlantic having lasted, according to his morbid imagination, at least as long as the war he had lately served through! At last, a letter came; and, as it really put fresh heart in him-- cheering up his drooping energies and banishing a sort of despondent feeling which had begun to prey upon him, altering him completely from his former buoyant self--he made up his mind in his old prompt fashion to visit some of the other seaports on the coast, "Down East," as Americans say, in order to try whether he might not be able there to get a billet.
He had very little money left now; for, he had not brought much with him from home, originally and the greater part of what he had in his pockets when he came ashore had melted away in paying for his board and lodging while remaining in New York.

Although he had put up at the cheapest boarding-house he could find, it was far dearer than the most expensive accommodation in Lubeck or even at a first-class hotel in any large town on the Continent.