Number One: Frazer's Magazine, October,
one thousand eight hundred and fifty-two.—
Number Two: One thousand eight hundred
and forty-eight.—Number Three: Let it
stand as written.—Number Four: Send no
money till you hear from me.

Having paid some two pounds ten shillings
across a counter, for these messages, and
having been furnished with a receipt, I
returned to my hotel, and subsequently went
to the opera. At about nine o'clock on the
following morning, whilst dressing, I heard a
knock at my door, and called out:

"Come in!"

A person in a semi-military uniform entered
my apartment, and, looking at a paper in his
hand, pronounced something like my name.
I bowed; I was immediately presented
with an invitation to attend at a certain
office—an office connected with the police
department—at the hour of two A.M.

"What on earth have I done?" I began
to ask myself; and forthwith summoned my
commissioner, who pulled his moustache, and
quietly suggested:

"Perhaps it is nothing;" adding, by way
of consoling me, " English gentlemen who
come to stay here are mostly sent for and
asked their business."

At the hour of two precisely, I was at the
place appointed, conducted thither by the
commissioner; who, having other business to
attend to, left me in a long and gloomy
passage, which I paced for about three-quarters
of an hour. The weather was bitterly cold,
and I was half-frozen when the individual who
had served me with the summons came out
at a door, and beckoned me to approach
him. I obeyed the movement of his finger, and
was shown into a room where sat an official
at a desk, writing. I made a bow on entering
the room; but, of this no sort of notice was
taken. As I was not asked to take a chair,
and as I never could stand still for any great
length of time, after a few minutes I began
to walk up and down the room, slowly, and
almost noiselessly. This appeared to annoy
the official, who still kept on writing; he
frowned awfully, and once or twice uttered
something like Donnerwetter! I know
exactly how long I was kept waiting in the
official's room, because I consulted my watch
several times. I was there eighteen minutes
before my attention was called to the business
on hand.

"Your name is Jenkins?" at length greeted
my ears.

"Yes," I replied.

"Well!—What do you come here for? To
Vienna, I mean."

"To see the City, and what it contains."

"Bah!"

This rather startled me. A long pause
ensued.

"This is your passport?" resumed the
official, holding up the document before me.

"Yes."

"Where is your servant mentioned in this
passport? He is not at the hotel."

"No, he is not. I was informed at the
frontier at Badenbagh, that, as his name
was not written in the passport, he
could not enter Austria. I had, therefore,
to send him back to his own country,
Belgium, at great inconvenience, and some
pecuniary loss."

"Why do you correspond in cipher?"

"I do not, that I am aware of."

"What! Then you tell me what is false"
(lügen).

I felt indignant on hearing this; but I
contrived to stifle my wrath, and remarked
calmly, "What I have asserted is the truth.
I do not correspond in cipher."

"But I have the proof."

"Then produce it."

My telegraphic despatch of the previous
evening was exhibited.

"There!" exclaimed the official,
triumphantly. "There! Yes! Forty-eight! Forty-
eight! I see. So will you see! What
business has an Englishman with Forty-
eight?"

I began to inform the official that they
were replies to certain questions forwarded
to me by a literary friend in Brussels. I
told him that the first question concerned
the date in which a certain article had
appeared in an English periodical—an article to
which my friend desired to make immediate
reference; that the second question referred
to the year in which a new edition of a
certain work had been published; that the third
question was about a sentence that my friend
wished to alter in a work of mine, the proof
sheets of which he was then correcting; and
the fourth question was simply this—Should
he, my friend, remit me from Brussels, or
from London, (to which last-mentioned place
he was about to proceed), a sum of money
I had left in his hands.

I felt that I might have spared myself the
trouble of making this explanation; for, the
official did not listen to one word of it. He
had made up his mind that I had come to
Vienna as the agent of all the exiles
in England; and that I was, therefore,
a dangerous character in the Austrian
capital.

"You are then a literary man?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. Well, I must see your
papers."

"I trust I may be spared the indignity of
having my papers searched."

"Indignity! What indignity? Many
correspondents of English journals have had
their papers searched in Vienna. Where do
you prefer the search to take place? At the
hotel—or here?"

"In my own apartments," I replied.

"Very well. I will send a person with
you. You will meet there another person
who will examine your papers and make the