We had become such a large party, that it is impossible to relate the whole of our experiences even in the half hour during which we dawdled round the Strasbourg waiting-room until the train should start.  I know it was then, for instance, that Mrs. Portheris took Dicky aside and told him how deeply she sympathised with him in his trying position, and bade him only be faithful to the dictates of his own heart and all would come right in time.  I know Dicky promised faithfully to do so, but I must not dwell upon it.  Nor is the opportunity adequate to express the indignation we all felt, and not Mr. Mafferton merely, at the insufficient personal impression we made upon the German railway officials.  They were so completely preoccupied with their magnificent selves and their vast business that they were unable even to look at us when we asked them questions, and their sole conception of a reply was an order, in terms that sounded brutal to a degree.  They were objectionably burly and red in the face; they wore an offensive number of buttons and straps upon their uniforms.  As Mr. Mafferton said, they utterly misconceived their position in life, attempting to Kaiser the travelling public by Divine right instead of recognising themselves as humble servants, buttoned only to be made more agreeable to the eye.

One such person trampled upon us to such an extent that I have never been able to satisfy myself that the Senator was sincere in making his little mistake.  We were sitting in dejected rows, with a number of other foreigners who had been similarly reduced, when this official entered the waiting-room, advanced to the middle of it, posed with great majesty, and emitted several bars of a kind of chant or chime.  It was delivered with too much vigour, and it stopped too abruptly, to be entirely enjoyable; but there was no doubt about the musical intention.  It was not even intoning; it was singing, beginning with moderation, going on stronger with indignation, and ending suddenly in a crescendo of denunciation.

We smiled in difficult self-restraint as he went away, and Dicky remarked that he supposed we were in their hands, we couldn’t object to anything they did to us.  In five minutes he came back to exactly the same spot and sang again the same words, in the same key, with the same unction.  “Encore!” exclaimed Mr. Malt boldly, but cowered under the glare that was turned upon him, and utterly fell away when we reminded him of the punishments attached in Germany to the charge of lese majeste.  Precisely five minutes more passed away, and Bawlinbuttons, as Miss Callis called him, entered again.  Then occurred the Senator’s little mistake.  In the midst of the second bar, the indignant one, Bawlinbuttons stopped short, petrified by poppa, who had advanced and was holding out copper coins whose usefulness we had left behind us, to the value of about fifteen cents.

“Here’s the collection,” said poppa benevolently—­for an instant or two he was quite audible—­“but unless you know some other tune the company wish me to say that they won’t trouble you any further.”