respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild
strawberries. I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed
very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best
leave reasoned conversation alone till I've had time to learn more
German, which I'm going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster
has discovered he needn't shout in order to make me understand.
Sitting so close to my ear, when he shouted into it it was exactly as
though some one had hit me, and hurt just as much.

He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding
ears so many Germans have. What is it that is left out of their heads,
I wonder? His moustache is like the Kaiser's, and he looks rather a
fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester's uniform and becoming
slouch hat with a feather stuck in it. Without his hat he is less
impressive, because of his head. I suppose he has to have a head, but
if he didn't have to he'd be very good-looking.

This is such a sweet place, little mother. I've got the dearest little
clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my
drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg's. You can't think how lovely it is
being here after the long hot journey. It's no fun travelling alone in
Germany if you're a woman. I was elbowed about and pushed out of the
way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an
ownerless trunk. Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said
things. One little boy--he couldn't have been more than ten--winked at
me and whispered something about kissing. The station at Stettin was
horrible, much worse than the Berlin one. I don't know where they all
came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and
extraordinarily disreputable and insolent. To add to the confusion on
the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their
families and bundles--I asked my porter who they were, and he told
me--being taken from one place where they had been working in the
fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce
dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them, but gentle, and,
compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good
many officers--it was altogether the most excited station I've seen, I
think--and they stared too, but I'm certain that if I had been in a
difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away. Kloster told
me Germans div