Here the richer citizens have met from time immemorial to
drink with solemnity and a decent leisure the wines sent hither in
their own ships from the Rhine, from Greece and the Crimea, from
Bordeaux and Burgundy, from the Champagne and Tokay. This is not
only the Rathskeller, but the real Rathhaus, where the Dantzigers
have taken counsel over their afternoon wine from generation to
generation, whence have been issued to all the world those decrees
of probity and a commercial uprightness between buyer and seller,
debtor and creditor, master and man, which reached to every corner
of the commercial world. And now it was whispered that the latter-
day Dantzigers--the sons of those who formed the Hanseatic League:
mostly fat men with large faces and shrewd, calculating eyes; high
foreheads; good solid men, who knew the world, and how to make their
way in it; withal, good judges of a wine and great drinkers, like
that William the Silent, who braved and met and conquered the
European scourge of mediaeval times--it was whispered that these
were reviving the Tugendbund.
Amid such contending interests, and in a free city so near to
several frontiers, men came and went without attracting undesired
attention. Each party suspected a new-comer of belonging to the
other.
"He scrapes a fiddle," Koch had explained to the inquiring fishwife.
And perhaps he knew no more than this of Antoine Sebastian.
Sebastian was poor.
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