284 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
Jones Wood on the East River between Sixtieth and Seventieth
Streets he attended whenever possible. Occasionally, he called on
an "old communist" friend and active organizer and propagandist
of his earlier days.
German was spoken in the Weitling home among the adults and
with the children, though the women as well as the head of the
family could speak and read English. Weitling read English, Ger
man, and French newspapers. In 1854, he read four papers daily.
Judging from his collection of clippings, the New York Tribune
must have been his favorite. Among the German-language papers
which he read regularly, he especially enjoyed the New Yorker
Kriminal Zeitung und Belletristisches Journal, and Die Neue Zeit,
a radical paper started in New York near the end of his life. Some
of the entries in his notebook were made in excellent French.
When Mrs. Weitling and her sister received calls from their rela
tives, the conversation usually lapsed into the "Low German" of
the Mecklenburg area.
One of Weitling's hobbies was collecting pennies, and he tried
to get a complete set dated from 1798 to 1855. His household pets
were cats and canaries. On one occasion, he saved a dog from the
abuse of a group of children, who sold him the animal for a dime;
he took him home, gave him the name Filou, and made a family
pet of the mongrel with the roguish French name.
Among Weitling's friends of these later years was a fairly well-
to-do tobacco merchant, Charles F. Tag, who gave him some
financial help to enable him to complete his inventions; and
Toaspern, a builder of pianos and organizer of a piano makers'
co-operative in Brooklyn who tried to sell Weitling a piano. Years
later, the eldest son bought one of the instruments which his
father could never afford. Other friends included Heinrich Ah¬
rends, an enthusiastic laborite whose photograph Weitling pos
sessed; F. A. Sorge, the leading Socialist of the period, and a
friend of the early days in Switzerland; Hermann Schlüter, once
editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, who was allowed to use
some of Weitling's papers when he wrote his monograph on the