The Jimmies have been so kind to us that we nearly choked over leaving them, but we consoled ourselves after the train left, and proceeded to draw the most invidious comparisons between French sleeping-cars and the rolling palaces we are accustomed to at home.  I am ashamed to think that I have made unpleasant remarks upon the discomforts of travel in America.  Oh, how ungrateful I have been for past mercies!

My companion is very patient, as a rule, but I heard her restlessly tossing around in her berth, and I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing much.  But don’t you think they have arranged the knobs in these mattresses in very curious places?"’

Well, it was a little like sleeping on a wood-pile during a continuous earthquake.  But that was nothing compared to the news broken to us about eleven o’clock that our luggage would be examined at the German frontier at five o’clock in the morning.  That meant being wakened at half past four.  But it was quite unnecessary, for we were not asleep.

It was cold and raining.  I got up and dressed for the day.  But my companion put her seal-skin on over her dressing-gown, and perched her hat on top of that hair of hers, and looked ready to cope with Diana herself.

“They’ll ruin my things if they unpack them,” I said.

“You just keep still and let me manage things,” she answered.  So I did.  I made myself as small as possible and watched her.  She selected her victim and smiled on him most charmingly.  He was tearing open the trunk of a fat American got up in gray flannel and curl-papers.  He dropped her tray and hurried up to my companion.

“Have you anything to declare, madam?” he asked.

“Tell him absolutely nothing,” she whispered to me.  I obeyed, but he never took his eyes from her.  She was tugging at the strap of her trunk in apparently wild eagerness to get it open.  She frowned and panted a little to show how hard it was, and he bounded forward to help her.  Then she smiled at him, and he blinked his eyes and tucked the strap in and chalked her trunk, with a shrug.  He hadn’t opened it.  She kept her eye on him and pointed to my trunk, and he chalked that.  Then seven pieces of hand luggage, and he chalked them all.  Then she smiled on him again, and I thanked him, but he didn’t seem to hear me, and she nodded her thanks and pulled me down a long stone corridor to the dining-room where we could get some coffee.

At the door I looked back.  The customs officer was still looking after my companion, but she never even saw it.

The dining-room was full of smoke, but the coffee and my first taste of zwieback were delicious.  Then we went out through a narrow doorway to the train, where we were jostled by Frenchmen with their habitual “Pardon!” (which partially reconciles you to being walked on), and knocked into by monstrous Germans, who sent us spinning without so much as a look of apology, and both of whom puffed their tobacco smoke directly in our faces.  It was still dark and the rain was whimpering down on the car-roof, and, take it all in all, the situation was far from pleasant, but we are hard to depress, and our spirits remain undaunted.