So I followed the bowing son of Shem into his dark and dirty shop and emerged presently wearing an appallingly ugly green mackintosh reeking hideously of rubber.  It was a shocking garment but I reflected that I was a German and must choose my garb accordingly.

Outside the shop I nearly ran into a little man who was loafing in the doorway.  He was a wizened, scrubby old fellow wearing a dirty peaked cap with a band of tarnished gold.  I knew him at once for one of those guides, half tout, half bully, that infest the railway termini of all great Continental cities.

“Want a guide, sir?” the man said in German.

I shook my head and hurried on.  The man trotted beside me.  “Want a good, cheap hotel, sir?  Good, respectable house....  Want a ...”

“Ach! gehen sie zum Teufel!” I cried angrily.  But the man persisted, running along beside me and reeling off his tout’s patter in a wheezing, asthmatic voice.  I struck off blindly down the first turning we came to, hoping to be rid of the fellow, but in vain.  Finally, I stopped and held out a gulden.

“Take this and go away!” I said.

The old fellow waved the coin aside.

“Danke, danke,” he said nonchalantly, looking at the same time to right and left.

Then he said in a calm English voice, utterly different from his whining accents of a moment before: 

“You must be a dam’ cool hand!”

But he didn’t bluff me, staggered though I was.  I said quickly in German: 

“What do you want with me?  I don’t understand you.  If you annoy me any more I shall call the police!”

Again he spoke in English and it was the voice of a well-bred Englishman that spoke: 

“You’re either a past master at the game or raving mad.  Why! the whole station is humming after you!  Yet you walked out of the buffet and through the whole lot of them without turning a hair.  No wonder they never spotted you!”

Again I answered in German: 

“Ich verstehe nicht!”

But he went on in English, without seeming to notice my observation: 

“Hang it all, man, you can’t go into Germany wearing a regimental tie!”

My hand flew to my collar and the blood to my head.  What a cursed amateur I was, after all!  I had entirely forgotten that I was wearing my regimental colours.  I was crimson with vexation but also with a sense of relief.  I felt I might trust this man.  It would be a sharp German agent who would notice a small detail like that.

Still I resolved to stick to German:  I would trust nobody.

But the guide had started his patter again.  I saw two workmen approaching.  When they had passed, he said, this time in English: 

“You’re quite right to be cautious with a stranger like me, but I want to warn you.  Why, I’ve been following you round all the morning.  Lucky for you it was me and not one of the others....”