For two hours the railway ferry had plowed between the mines that strew the way to Denmark with potential death, and as slowly the houses of Warnemunde appeared in shadow against the darkening day, some one touched my arm. "Safe now." He was the courier. He had traveled with me from New York to Copenhagen, a bland, reserved young man, with a caution beyond his years. I had come to know he was making the trip as a German courier, and he was an American with no Teutonic blood in his veins! Knowing the ropes, he had suggested that he see me through to Berlin. "It's good we came over the Baltic," he remarked, "instead of making that long trip through Jutland. We save eight hours." "Yes," I agreed, "nothing like slipping in the back door." And being new to it then, and being very conscious of certain letters I carried, and of the power implied in the documents which I knew he carried, I wondered what the frontier guard would do. During the two hours we ferried from the Danish shore the passengers talked in a troubled way of the military search given every one at Warnemunde and I smiled to myself in a reassuring way. Yes, they would be searched, poor devils!... But the courier and I? I wondered if the German Lieutenant at Warnemunde would ask us to take coffee with him. I even took out my watch. No, it could hardly be done, for by the time the soldiers had finished searching all these passengers the train would be leaving. Too bad! Coffee and a chat with some other lieutenant, then. "Yes," the courier was saying as the ferry docked and we caught, under the glint of the sentries' rifles, a glimpse of the _Landwehr_ red and blue, "it will be so easy here--just a formality, whereas if we had taken the other route it no doubt would have been harder. You see," he explained, "when a train crosses the Kiel canal a soldier is posted in every compartment, the window shades are pulled down and the passengers are warned not to look out on penalty of instant death. Of course that is necessary for military reasons. Naturally the whole inspection at that frontier is more severe because of the Kiel canal." By this time the big boat had been made fast to a long railroad pier and as we crossed the gang plank we made out in the bluish haze of an arc lamp, a line of soldiers who seemed to be herding the passengers into what appeared to be a long wooden shed newly built. Crowds are the same the world over, so no one held back, all pushing, luggage and passports in hand, into the frame structure built, I realized, for purposes of military inspection.