ance all
in a long row, up above people's heads. In fact, we looked like
a flock of giant fowls roosting, only wide awake.

The smiles and shivers fairly crowded each other in some parts of our
career.

Suddenly, when everything interesting seemed at an end, we all
recollected how long it was since we had started on our funny
ride. Hours, we thought, and still the horses ran. Now we rode
through quieter streets where there were fewer shops and more
wooden houses. Still the horses seemed to have but just started.
I looked over our perch again. Something made me think of a
description I had read of criminals being carried on long
journeys in uncomfortable things--like this? Well, it was
strange--this long, long drive, the conveyance, no word of
explanation; and all, though going different ways, being packed
off together. We were strangers; the driver knew it. He might
take us anywhere--how could we tell? I was frightened again as
in Berlin. The faces around me confessed the same.

Yes, we are frightened. We are very still. Some Polish women
over there have fallen asleep, and the rest of us look such a
picture of woe, and yet so funny, it is a sight to see and
remember.

Our mysterious ride came to an end on the outskirts of the city, where
we were once more lined up, cross-questioned, disinfected, labelled,
and pigeonholed. This was one of the occasions when we suspected that
we were the victims of a conspiracy to extort money from us; for here,
as at every repetition of the purifying operations we had undergone, a
fee was levied on us, so much per head. My mother, indeed, seeing her
tiny hoard melting away, had long since sold some articles from our
baggage to a fellow passenger richer than she, but even so she did not
have enough money to pay the fee demanded of her in Hamburg. Her
statement was not accepted, and we all suffered the last indignity of
having our persons searched.

This last place of detention turned out to be a prison. "Quarantine"
they called it, and there was a great deal of it--two weeks of it. Two
weeks within high brick walls, several hundred of us herded in half a
dozen compartments,--numbered compartments,--sleeping in rows, like
sick people in a hospital; with roll-call morning and night, and short
rations three times a day; with never a sign of the free world beyond
our barred windows; with anxiety and longing and