From Lady de Washaway’s work I turned to peruse Hugo von Halbwitz’s admirable book, Easy Marks, or How the German Government Borrows its Funds; and after that I had read Karl von Wiggleround’s Despatches and Barnstuff’s Confidential Letters to Criminals.

As a consequence I fell asleep as if poisoned.

But the amazing thing is that, whenever it was or was not that I fell asleep, I woke up to find myself in Germany.

I cannot offer any explanation as to how this came about.  I merely state the fact.

There I was, seated on the grassy bank of a country road.

I knew it was Germany at once.  There was no mistaking it.  The whole landscape had an orderliness, a method about it that is, alas, never seen in British countries.  The trees stood in neat lines, with the name of each nailed to it on a board.  The birds sat in regular rows, four to a branch, and sang in harmony, very simply, but with the true German feeling.

There were two peasants working beside the road.  One was picking up fallen leaves, and putting them into neat packets of fifty.  The other was cutting off the tops of the late thistles that still stood unwithered in the chill winter air, and arranging them according to size and colour.  In Germany nothing is lost; nothing is wasted.  It is perhaps not generally known that from the top of the thistle the Germans obtain picrate of ammonia, the most deadly explosive known to modern chemistry, while from the bulb below, butter, crude rubber and sweet cider are extracted in large quantities.

The two peasants paused in their work a moment as they saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple gentility of the German working man, quietly stood on his head until I had finished looking at him.

I felt quite certain, of course, that it must only be a matter of a short time before I would inevitably be arrested.

I felt doubly certain of it when I saw a motor speeding towards me with a stout man, in military uniform and a Prussian helmet, seated behind the chauffeur.

The motor stopped, but to my surprise the military man, whom I perceived to be wearing the uniform of a general, jumped out and advanced towards me with a genial cry of: 

“Well, Herr Professor!”

I looked at him again.

“Why, Fritz!” I cried.

“You recognize me?” he said.

“Certainly,” I answered, “you used to be one of the six German waiters at McCluskey’s restaurant in Toronto.”

The General laughed.

“You really took us for waiters!” he said.  “Well, well.  My dear professor!  How odd!  We were all generals in the German army.  My own name is not Fritz Schmidt, as you knew it, but Count von Boobenstein.  The Boobs of Boobenstein,” he added proudly, “are connected with the Hohenzollerns.  When I am commanded to dine with the Emperor, I have the hereditary right to eat anything that he leaves.”