re we'll stay, I suppose," grumbled Henri, when some weeks had
passed, and they had, as it were, settled down to the routine of camp
life in Ruhleben, and had become inured--as far as young men of active
dispositions and healthy appetites can become inured, to the scantily
short rations with which the Germans supplied them. "It's awfully hard
luck to be prisoners in a place like this when our people are fighting."

"Awfully hard," Jules echoed despondently, for he was not gifted with
quite the allowance of high spirits possessed of Henri.

"But it needn't necessarily last for ever, this imprisonment," his
friend told him; and perhaps he had said the same a hundred times
already. "Little news comes to us in this hole, but yet tales have
reached us of men who have escaped, who have got out of Germany and
have joined their French regiments."

Yes, there had been news of such escapes, and no doubt there would be
others; and perhaps even Henri and Jules might themselves contrive to
get out of their predicament. Yet, how? Look round the camp and see
those rolls of barbed wire which encircled them, see the armed sentries
who moved along their beats, and the jailers and men appointed to watch
and spy amongst the prisoners, who strode here and there, hectoring the
weak, browbeating the strong, and fawning, perhaps, upon those
fortunate enough to be possessed of a store of money. Bitterly did the
two young fellows regret the chances which had brought them to Berlin,
and had found them there at the outbreak of war; for, indeed, it was
but a chance which had taken them to the Kaiser's city.

Let us explain how it happened that these two young men were of such
distinctly British appearance. After all, there was nothing
extraordinary about that fact, nothing particularly unusual, for in
Paris, for years past, there has been a sufficiency of British tailors
to turn out every young man after the latest British fashion. But it
was more than clothes in the case of these two young men, more than
mere dress, that made them so conspicuously British; it was
environment, in fact, training and education; it was the result of the
intuition of their parents.

"France is all right, my boy," Monsieur de Farquissaire had told Henri
when he was quite a lad, "France is a splendid country, and, if you are
but like your fellows when you reach man's age, neither you nor I will
have anything to complain of. But there is good in other
nationa