The Germans themselves took no steps to deny
these stories, but in the prison we found a large collection of forlorn
newsdealers. Having been captured with the forbidden wares in their
possession, they had mysteriously vanished from the ken of their
friends; but they had not been "put against the wall," as they say in
Europe. They had been given fourteen days apiece, with a promise of six
months if they transgressed a second time.
One little man, with the longest and sleekest and silkiest black
whiskers I have seen in many a day, recognized us as Americans and drew
near to tell us his troubles in a confidential whisper. By his bleached
indoor complexion and his manners anyone would have known him for a
pastry cook or a hairdresser. A hairdresser he was; and in a better day
than this, not far remote, had conducted a fashionable establishment on
a fashionable boulevard.
"Ah, I am in one very sad state," he said in his twisted English. "I
start for Ostend to take winter garments for my two small daughters,
which are there at school, and they arrest me--these Germans--and keep
me two days in a cowshed, and then bring me back here and put me here in
this so-terrible-a-place for two weeks; and all for nothing at all.
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