This rather tickled the camp, including the German officers, who immediately responded with a gift of some twenty volumes. Unfortunately, these were entirely in German, through which only one or two of the officers could even spell their way, but they were in the nature of a godsend to M. Bloch, a Russian dentist, who was the only foreign officer in camp, and who spoke German as fluently as one may speak that influent tongue. _Pro tem._, then, I considered myself as acting to him in the not onerous capacity of private librarian. A few fragments of Tauchnitz editions were very literally “fluttering” around the camp, and on these I affixed wherever possible the seal of my office--and a touch of seccotine. I also sent out appeals to the Christlichen Vereine Junger Männer, Berlin; to Sir Alfred Davies, and the Camp Libraries Committee, London; while I made ordering of a formidable list of Tauchnitz publications. Berlin responded almost immediately with thirty volumes of varied sort, mostly the gift apparently of private citizens. In several of the works I observed a bookplate, inscribed “Sophie, Mein Buch,” and representing a very green and very flourishing Tree of Knowledge, bearing five apples of a more than tempting redness, a rising sun, and an open volume. Somehow the bookplate conjured up before me a vision of the gentle Sophie, fresh as the dawn, and rosy and ripe as the pictured apples. With this collection and the odds and ends floating about the camp I decided to open shop, though my shelves would only afford a fraction of a book per man. Accordingly at nine o’clock in the morning, immediately after roll-call, I headed a regular rush and stampede to the library; undid the padlock, swung wide the door of the book cupboard, and declared the library indeed open. As senior officer of the camp, the Colonel had choice of the first volume, after which it was a case of first come first served. For a few minutes the floor space in front of my cupboard presented something of the appearance of a football field with a “rugger” scrum on, and then I closed the door upon only two books--and these the second volumes of two-volume novels. In less than a month, however, I had several hundred books under my charge. One day the German interpreter handed me a note of four volumes which he was desirous of having on loan. These were: “The Poems of Robert Burns”; “The Adventures of Tom Sawyers”; “An Ideal Husband,” by Oscar Wilde; and “East Lynne,” by----Carlyle! This last rather nonplussed me until I recalled that the name of the greatly-wronged and long-suffering solicitor in the novel--which one might say had solved the problem of perpetual emotion--was Carlyle. It was this same interpreter who, donating to the library a small guide book of Beeskow, first tore off the cover which carried a map of the town and environs. “As a good German,” he said, “it is my duty to prevent you from escaping.” WE WALK ABROAD