Lieutenant O'Brien reached the barrier in the night, and hid himself when he heard the tramp of the German sentinel. He waited until the sentinel returned and noted carefully how long he was gone, in order to learn how much time he had in which to work. He thought he could build a ladder out of two fallen trees by tying branches across them, and in this way get over the ten-foot center fence. He succeeded in getting his ladder together, by working all night, and with it he hid in the woods all the next day. When night came, he shoved the ladder under the first barbed wire fence and crawled in after it. He placed it carefully up against one of the posts to which the charged electric wires were fastened and began to climb up it, when all of a sudden it slipped and came in contact with the live wires. The trees out of which he had constructed it were so soaked with water that they made good conductors of electricity, and he received such a charge that he was thrown to the ground unconscious, where he lay while the sentinel passed within seven feet of him. He gave up the ladder and decided to dig under the live wires. He had only his hands to dig with, but the ground was fairly soft. After some hours, he had a hole deep enough and wide enough to crawl through without touching the live wire. He found a wire running along under the ground. He knew this could not be alive, for the ground would discharge any electricity there might be in it. So he took hold of it and, after much struggling, was able to get it out of the way. Then he crawled carefully under the live wires and was a free man in Holland, for he wore no uniform and would not be interned. At the first village he came to, some of the Dutch people loaned him enough money to ride third-class to Rotterdam. He said he was glad he was not riding first-class, for he would have looked as much out of place in a first-class compartment as a Hun would in heaven. The English consul at Rotterdam gave him money and a passport to England, and from there he came to see his mother, in a little town in Illinois, called Momence. FOOTNOTES: [10] BY COURTESY OF HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. RAEMAEKERS There are many ways of fighting, and the Germans, in their forty-four years of planning to conquer the world, thought of them all. The only forces they neglected were the mighty forces of fairness, justice, innocence, pity, purity, friendship, love, and other similar spiritual forces that Americans have been taught to look upon as the greatest of all.