It was just seventeen and a half minutes to eight when I got back to the egg shop of Herr Blumfeld. He was sweeping. I waved my card triumphantly, "I have it," I cried. He leaned his broom against the counter and pointed to a sign hanging over the stove, "_Eier ausverkauft_" (Eggs sold out). I looked at it, then staggered, and then fainted dead away in the greasy arms of the astonished Herr Blumfeld, _Eier-Grosshändler_. WHAT THE GERMANS READ IN WAR TIME. "Gobble! Ah a gobble!" That is what it sounds like when you hear the newspaper sellers crying out their wares on Potsdamer Platz in the evening. But this is really not what they are saying. They are saying, _Abendausgabe_ or "Evening Edition." It is a pretty sight, the Potsdamer Platz--cabs rattling along, jingling street-car bells, the square black with civilians and gray with soldiers, wagons drawn up to the sidewalks loaded down with bright-colored fruit and vegetables, women selling flowers--violets, roses, lilies-of-the-valley--_Zehn Pfennige ein Sträusschen_, and above all the other sounds the cries of "Gobble! Gobble Ah-a-gobble!" Compared with our big American newspapers a German paper is a very little affair. Its pages are about half as big as the pages of our papers, and in the morning they usually have only eight pages, and in the evening six. There are no glaring headlines to a German paper, and no red ink is used. Even when Kitchener was drowned or America declared war, it appeared in the papers as a headline with letters no more than three-quarters of an inch high. There is absolutely nothing sensational about a German newspaper, even in war time. They all look alike, and one has to look at the date of the paper to make sure that it is not the paper of the day before. They have no cartoons, and they rarely have any pictures. The Sunday supplement has few "funnies" and never any colored pictures. There are no spicy scandals, no sensational divorce trials and no tales of thrilling murders with the picture of the house where the dark deed was committed marked with an X. Then there is no woman's page and no society column. You ask, well, what have they in their papers? [Illustration: _A Reading-Room for Soldiers on the West Front._]