ation. I was tired. But
every pen again stopped, and one in authority asked in a voice like
thunder what I made here. I said that I had come to _anmelden_ myself,
and he began to ask the usual questions with an air of suspicion that
was highly offensive. You can see for yourself that I do not look like
an anarchist or anything but what I am, a respectable married woman of
middle age. I told the man everything he wanted to know, and at every
item he grunted as if he knew it was a lie. In the end he asked me
very rudely how long a stay I meant to make in Germany.

"Not a day longer than I can help," I said; "for your manners do not
please me."

All the pens stopped again till I left the office, and when I got
back to my mother she wept bitterly; for she said that I should be
prosecuted for _Beamtenbeleidigung_ and put in prison.

"But the really interesting fact about the system is that it doesn't
work," said a German to me; "when I wanted my papers a little while
ago I could not get them. Nothing about me could be discovered.
Officially I did not exist."

Yet he had inherited a name famous all over the world, was a
distinguished scientific man himself, and had been born in the city
where his existence was not known to the police.

"Take care you don't go in at an _Ausgang_ or out at an _Eingang_,"
said an Englishman who had just come back from Berlin. "Take care you
don't try to buy stamps at the Post Office out of your turn. Remember
that you can't choose your cab when you arrive. A policeman gives you
a number, and you have to hunt amongst a crowd of cabs for that
number, even if it is pouring with rain. Remember that the police
decides that you must buy your opera tickets on a Sunday morning, and
stand _queue_ for hours till you get them. If you have a cold in your
head, stay at home. Last winter a man was arrested for sneezing
loudly. It was considered _Beamtenbeleidigung_. The Englishwoman who
walked on the grass in the Tiergarten was not arrested, because the
official who saw her died of shock at the sight, and could not perform
his duty."

Wherever you go in Germany you hear stories of police interference and
petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress
some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put
a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the
afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can
hardly have been visible from