I may meet these confident gentlemen tonight.  If not, it is highly probable I shall meet others who are equally confident, and who will express the same views, which they hold because they are the views of the German people.

At eleven o’clock, when I start back to the hotel, the streets will be almost empty.  Aix will have gone to bed, and in bed it will peacefully stay unless a military Zeppelin sails over its rooftrees, making a noise like ten million locusts all buzzing at once.  There were two Zeppelins aloft last night, and from my window I saw one of them quite plainly.  It was hanging almost stationary in the northern sky, like a huge yellow gourd.  After a while it made off toward the weSt. One day last week three of them passed, all bound presumably for Paris or Antwerp, or even London.  That time the people grew a bit excited; but now they take a Zeppelin much as a matter of course, and only wonder mildly where it came from and whither it is going.

As for to-morrow, I imagine to-morrow will be another to-day; but yesterday was different.  I had a streak of luck.  It is forbidden to civilians, and more particularly to correspondents, to go prowling about eastern Belgium just now; but I found a friend in a naturalized German-American, formerly of Chicago, but living now in Germany, though he still retains his citizenship in the United States.

Like every one else in Aachen, he is doing something for the government, though I can only guess at the precise nature of his services.  At any rate he had an automobile, a scarce thing to find in private hands in these times; and, what was more, he had a military pass authorizing him to go to Liege and to take two passengers along.  He invited me to go with him for a day’s ride through the country where the very first blows were swapped in the western theater of hostilities.

We started off in the middle of a fickle-minded shower, which first blew puffs of wetness in our faces, like spray on a flawy day at sea, and then broke off to let the sun shine through for a minute or two.  For two or three kilometers after clearing the town we ran through a district that smiled with peace and groaned with plenty.  On the verandas of funny little gray roadhouses with dripping red roofs officers sat over their breakfast coffee.  A string of wagons passed us, bound inward, full of big, white, clean-looking German pigs.  A road builder, repairing the ruts made by the guns and baggage trains, stood aside for us to pass and pulled off his hat to us.  This was Europe as it used to be—­Europe as most American tourists knew it.