At ten o'clock no signs of G and S-. We waited until eleven, and still they did not come. When they had not put in an appearance at half-past eleven we came to the conclusion that it was time to make a move, and felt justified in assuming that they would not come. When we left the café we felt very disconsolate. The parcel for which S- held the receipt contained a number of articles in the way of dripping, ship's biscuits, and warm under. clothing, which were as near being absolutely essential as anything could be, and there was no prospect whatsoever of being able to replace them.

In the first place, our funds were not large enough, and we had hoped to be able to purchase for me, out of the money we had, a pair of strong walk ing-boots, as I had left the prison in a thin pair, which were very uncomfortable. There was no possibility of buying these if the money had to be spent on replacing the articles we had lost. From faots we learned later, there is very little doubt that S had not played the game. We wandered about the street in front of the café for some time, time, before before we abandoned hope of meeting them, imagining that they

than they had promised. Finally, we abandoned all hope, and, very downhearted, went across to the station, in order to get our suit-case and precious articles for the journey from the left luggage office. When we arrived there, we found to our consternation that Keith had lost the receipt.

While we were standing in front of the counter, and while Keith was searching through all his pockets for the receipt, a man, who I am absolutely certain was a detective, came and rubbed shoulders with us, and intently watched what was going on. Seeing that our prison was next door to the chief police-station in Berlin, we had had very many opportunities of getting to know the detective type, and there was no doubt whatever, in the mind of either of us, that this man was one. As а matter of fact, we learned, after our recapture, that deteotives had been placed on the main stations in Berlin within an hour of our escape, with a view to preventing our departure from the city.

Keith, conscious that he was being watched, made a display of a document, furnished with a Prussian official stamp which he carried in his pocket-book, and I said to him in German in as matter-of-fact a manner as possible

"You are unable to find the ticket-what?"

He answered in German"Yes; I am afraid I have lost it."

To our immense relief the detective turned away, strolled to the counter to watch other people, and then moved about, inquisitively observing the movements of persons passing to and fro in the crowded hall.

We got out into the street as quickly as possible, in order to discuss the serious state of affairs. It was close upon midnight. It seemed futile to go to a hotel, without luggage and without papers; and in view of so many disappointing occurrences at the very outset of our adventures, we felt that we were doomed to failure at the very beginning. While we were wondering where we could possibly spend the night, I remembered the name and address of an unpretentious hotel, where I had once stayed in times of peace. We drove there in a cab, having decided that we would say we had come from Elberfeld or Hannover, and that we had had the misfortune to lose our luggage, which contained our identification papers.

"Full up!" was the night porter's reply on our arrival there.

The cabby, however, at our request, drove us to another quiet hotel of the same class, and there the night porter informed us we could have a room, though he listened very suspiciously to our story of lost luggage and lost papers. He was inquisitive in the extreme, and when he had left our room, we looked at each other, and agreed that we should be very fortunate if

we managed to leave the hotel without being arrested as suspeoted characters. Still, in for a penny in for a pound. There was nothing for it but to make the best of things.

After our prison beds, the clean white sheets and eiderdowns were a wonderful treat, and we both slept well. We knew that it was the practice of the Berlin police to inspect hotel registers at eight o'clock each morning, and make inquiries about the different guests. We therefore arranged to be called early, on the pretext that we had to leave by train from a certain station. We took the precaution of giving the name of a station in quite a different part of the town from the station from which we actually intended to leave. We left the hotel about half-past seven in the morning, and after having written fictitious names and addresses in the hotel register, had a short conversation with the landlady, who asked us point-blank whether we were foreigners or not. We denied the horrid imputation, and assured her that we were German business men who had come on business to Berlin, and were unfit for military service. A A young officer took breakfast at a neighbouring table in the dining-room and bowed to us as he entered. We asked for minute directions in order to get to the station from which we did not intend to travel, and, telling the landlady that we should, in all likelihood, be back again that night, and

We went for a short distance in the direction in which she would expect us to go, and then, after waiting a long time for a tram, got one, full, apparently, of women olerks going to business. This tram took us again to the Zoological Gardens Station.

Keith, before we left the hotel in the morning, had found the luggage receipt in one of his pockets. This fact, coupled with the fact that we had managed to get away from the hotel without meeting the police, brought us one little ray of hope.

We realised that it was absolutely essential to get food of some kind. Ration cards we did not possess, and rationed articles we were, there fore, unable to buy. As practically everything was rationed, the only things which we were able to purchase were two pounds of chocolate creams at nine shillings a pound, and two small tins of sardines, which cost us four and six each, We had hoped to be able to buy nuts, but we could obtain them nowhere. We got our luggage, and at about half-past ten in the morning found ourselves on the platform of the Zoological Gardens Station, with second class tickets for Hannover in our pockets. Our experience on the previous evening with a detective on that very station did not tend to make us feel very much at ease, though we were carrying one or two

We had intentionally taken tickets for a Bummelzug (slow train), in the belief that such a train would be less likely to be visited by detectives than an express corridor train, and I think we were were correct in our surmise. The journey was a painfully slow one, and there were times when we seemed to be subjected to very close scrutiny by some of the other occupants of our compartment. At Stendal we had a long wait, and spent about an hour over a fairly decent meal of fish and vegetables, which we obtained without having to produce ration cards. While we were walking along the platform to our compartment in the train, we found ourselves at the tailend of a column of about one hundred Russian military prisoners who were being transported by German guards to a village in the neighbourhood. They travelled by the same train, and I remember to this day my feeling of mingled exultation and compassion,exultation at the thought that we had, for a brief spell at any rate, flung off our bonds, and compassion for the poor fellows who walked in front of us, cut off for the uncertain duration of the war from the land of their birth. With what glee those very guards would have marched us back to

prison had they only had the faintest notion of our identity! It was one of those amusing situations which could be enjoyed at the time. Most similar experiences are funny only in retrospect.

Whenever people entered our compartment, I was always either pretending to sleep or pretending to be very deeply engrossed in my book, which I read twice through. Keith later on pointed out to me with pardonable glee that I had bought a faulty copy, several chapters of the book appearing in duplicate. I had read the book twice from beginning to end without noticing this. My thoughts were centred upon other things than Captain König's adventures. Our own adventures were my chief concern.

On arrival in Hannover about 7 o'clock the same evening, we deposited our luggage at the railway station and went into the town. It was already dark, and we spent about an hour in the main streets making a few additional purchases, visiting cafés, and searching for a suitable hotel for the night. In a shop where we tried in vain to purchase a pair of boots for me, in place of my thin ones, two young Germans who came in eyed us very suspiciously, and Keith thought he saw them follow us and enter the same café. We immediately paid for our beer and, once in the crowded main street, we set out to throw them off the scent, zigzagging through quiet and orowded streets until we felt reasonably

certain that they had lost sight of us.

Knowing quite well that the odds were dead against us, we were both of the opinion that it would be very nice, after recapture, should we fail in our enterprise, to have as many pleasant memories as possible to dwell upon in solitary confinement. What could be pleasanter than the sharp oontrast between prison skilly and the memory of at least one good square meal? So, to a restaurant. We found Hannover's best in the St Georg Palast Restaurant, where we had a most excellent fish meal. The large room was full of elegant women and smart officers, in their pale-blue uniforms, Hannover being a centre where the élite of the cavalry officers of the German army are quartered. We ate, drank, and smoked, supremely at our ease by this time, and when an excellent string orchestra on a raised platform at the end of the room began to play light music, I had to take a very firm grip of myself in order not to blubber like a child. Heighho! we were having a run for our money.

Late that night we went to our fifth-rate hotel, where no one asked to see our papers (though we were required to sign the registration book), and we asked to be called at an early hour the following morning. I gave myself a name which I thought would not be too difficult to pronounce, and quite enjoyed inventing occupation, birthday, the name of the place from which I had

come, and so on.

I made, and remembered when it was too late, was to misspell the name of the town I chose as my place of residence.

When we were called the next morning, Keith, roused from sleep by the noise of some one knocking at the door, called out in English "Thank you!" which I tried to drown just in time with a very sleepy but fairly loud "Danke schön!"

At breakfast, the waiter was very insolent because we could not produce traveller's breadcards, and it was difficult to know what attitude to take up towards him. An attitude of haughtiness on the one hand, or of obsequiousness on the other, might have ended in fatal consequences. We got out of the difficulty by telling him resignedly that we would do without bread altogether. He little knew!

Although we had no intention of leaving from the main station, we sent the porter to the cloak-room with our suitcase, and called for it about an hour later. The intervening time we spent in a park, the name of which I have forgotten, in the suburbs of the city. Then we took a tram to a suburban station named Hainholz, to the west of Hannover on the main line, and there booked to Osnabrück, I believe, by slow train, our intention being to book again there to Haltern, a small railway junction about twenty to twenty-five miles from the Dutch frontier. It was about ten o'clock when we left, and apart from long waits at cer

At Minden, where we had a long wait, we wished to spend our time in the station buffet, and in order to reach it, had to pass through the barrier between the ticket collector and two German military police, who were examining papers. The presence of these military policemen made us very nervous, but we noticed that, like the "red-caps" in our own country, they had to do only with men in uniform, and when our turn came we passed by them quite safely. In the buffet we were served with a fine veal ragout and vegetables at a very low price, and no coupons were asked

for. I mention this fact because I have often contended that food conditions in Berlin are not typical of food conditions throughout Germany, and in my opinion never will be. It is misleading in the extreme for a casual observer to generalise from what he has seen in Berlin. My experience is that food conditions vary very greatly throughout the whole empire, according to the favourable or unfavourable situation of the town in question, and also according to the efficient or inefficient administration of the particular distriot. Prophecies to the effect that Germany will collapse through starvation in a few weeks' or a few months' time