Earlier there had been everywhere sentries, and, not daring to breathe, I waited for one of them to challenge, but, except for the creaking of the stairs and of my ankle-bones, which seemed to explode like firecrackers, there was not a sound.  I was afraid, and wished myself safely back in my cell, but I was more afraid of Rupert, and I kept on feeling my way until I had reached the garden.  There some one spoke to me in French, and I found my host.

“The animals have gone,” he said; “all of them.  I will give you a bed now, and when it is light you shall have breakfast.”  I told him my orders were to leave his house at three.

“But it is murder!” he said.  With these cheering words in my ears, I thanked him, and he bid me bonne chance.

In my left hand I placed the pass, folded so that the red seal of the General Staff would show, and a match-box.  In the other hand I held ready a couple of matches.  Each time a sentry challenged I struck the matches on the box and held them in front of the red seal.  The instant the matches flashed it was a hundred to one that the man would shoot, but I could not speak German, and there was no other way to make him understand.  They were either too surprised or too sleepy to fire, for each of them let me pass.  But after I had made a mark of myself three times I lost my nerve and sought cover behind a haystack.  I lay there until there was light enough to distinguish trees and telegraph-poles, and then walked on to Ath.  After that, when they stopped me, if they could not read, the red seal satisfied them; if they were officers and could read, they cursed me with strange, unclean oaths, and ordered me, in the German equivalent, to beat it.  It was a delightful walk.  I had had no sleep the night before and had eaten nothing, and, though I had cut away most of my shoe, I could hardly touch my foot to the road.  Whenever in the villages I tried to bribe any one to carry my knapsack or to give me food, the peasants ran from me.  They thought I was a German and talked Flemish, not French.  I was more afraid of them and their shotguns than of the Germans, and I never entered a village unless German soldiers were entering or leaving it.  And the Germans gave me no reason to feel free from care.  Every time they read my pass they were inclined to try me all over again, and twice searched my knapsack.

After that happened the second time I guessed my letter to the President of France might prove a menace, and, tearing it into little pieces, dropped it over a bridge, and with regret watched that historical document from the ex-President of one republic to the President of another float down the Sambre toward the sea.  By noon I decided I would not be able to make the distance.  For twenty-four hours I had been without sleep or food, and I had been put through an unceasing third degree, and I was nearly out.  Added to that, the chance of my losing the road was excellent; and