bought. One of these finally precipitated matters. It was the
_Fliegende Blaetter_, a comic paper of about the class of _Life_ or
_Punch_. There was in it a joke in German argot which had been too
much for my scant knowledge of the language and the courier who had
escorted me from the Embassy had by the merest hazard translated it
for me. In my desperate efforts to amuse myself I was looking through
this sheet again and encountering this joke thought, "If I don't
write down the English I shall forget it." Whereupon I took out a
pencil and wrote the translation interlinearly.

Soon afterwards one of the detectives got up, went out into the
corridor, and came back with three conductors who, in Germany, of
course, are military officials. The three civilians who had shared the
compartment left us as if they had been rehearsed. One of the
detectives then suddenly burst into a perfect berserker rage, getting
quite purple in the face, and snatching up the _Fliegende Blaetter_
proceeded carefully to turn over the pages again and again, holding
each page against the light. It was altogether melodramatically
ridiculous. Taking the paper from me in this way, although offensive,
was perhaps within his rights since it concerned me only in a personal
and not in an official way, and so I sat quite calmly in my seat and,
biding my time, made no move of any kind. I paid no attention to the
conductors, judging the detective to be the kingpin and the conductors
merely dragged in as a matter of routine. None of them could read
English and they chose to regard the interlineation (one line of
about ten words) as extraordinarily suspicious.

The detective asked me for my passports and did so without going
through the customary formality of showing his police card. I demanded
as a matter of routine that he do this and began to draw out of my
pocket the large envelope in which I keep all my documents in order to
take out my Eagle-stamped German courier's paper. Without complying
with my request he grabbed for this envelope, while at the same moment
someone jerked at the bag which was between my knees. All this was an
affair totally different from that of the _Fliegende Blaetter_. I had
thoroughly thought out what I would do in an emergency if German
officials should attempt to take my pouch from me, and had decided
that I should make enough of a resistance so that there should be no
possibility of disputing the fact that physical force had be