When we reached the bottom of the hill shots broke the silence. Rifles answered them, and their echo rolled on between the hills. A white dog, frightened to death, rushed past me like an arrow, his tail between his legs, and his ears pressed tightly back. The caretaker of one of the empty villas, an old Swabian gardener, stood in the gate, smoking his pipe and watching the road. “Himmelsakrament!... The Russians have escaped from the prisoners’ camp, that’s what people say in the shop. Goodness knows what is going to happen to us....” “False alarms,” I said as I passed. The firing increased every moment. “Mother will fret,” said my sister Mary. We took leave of the others and turned back. Beyond the Devil’s Ditch, where the road starts up the hill, two bullets whistled over our heads. They must have come from the bushes near by, for we could smell the powder. In front of us a human form emerged from the fog. “That one went too low,” he muttered. “God guarded me so that it missed me.” The stranger had a big collar and wore a soldier’s cap. He might have been a non-commissioned officer. “Can one get newspapers down there by the electric tram?” he asked, touching his cap. “No, they don’t sell papers to-day.” The man turned back, and, leaning heavily on his stick climbed the hill slowly behind us. He never spoke, but sighed now and then, and one of his boots tapped curiously on the pavement. Through my thoughts I had heard the tapping for some time before I realized that the poor fellow had an artificial leg. “It was all in vain,” he exclaimed unexpectedly, and his voice sounded even duller than before. I could not see his face, but somehow I felt that this man with a wooden leg was weeping in the dark. That made me think of my brother, and of the others, the cripples, the blind, the sick, the maimed, who all say to-day with a lump in their throat: “it was in vain....” When I reached our garden another shot passed over my head. I pressed myself against the trunk of a tree and waited a little. I seemed to hear my heart beating in the tree. The danger passed by and I went on. The lighted windows of the house shone gently upon the path and beckoned to me, just as they had done the day before, just as they had done on any day when my steps took me home. When I entered the house I found boxes and trunks in the hall, and my mother was packing. She was putting boxes tied with lilac ribbon into the trunks, her own dear old belongings which she had treasured with so much love throughout a long life. Indefatigable, she went to and fro. She bent down, brought another object, never complaining and astonishingly calm. Meanwhile the fire on the hearth went out, and the sticky air of the night penetrated through the shutters. The dining-room had become very cold too. We did not dare to make fires: our wood in the cellar was running short and should we fail in our attempt to hire a van, who knew how long we might have to stay here?