I had two hearty meals that day in cheap restaurants--taking care to order no bread or anything else I felt there might be a chance of my needing a “card” for--and that night swung up on to the “rods” of a passenger train that had slowed down to something like ten miles an hour at a crossing, and rode for several hours in a direction which I correctly figured to be that of the Dutch frontier. I spent the following day moving freely about a good-sized manufacturing city, and the next night “beat” through to a town on the border of Holland. As this was not a place where there were any factories, my machinist’s rig-out didn’t “merge into the landscape” in quite the same way it did in the places where there was a lot of manufacturing, and I stayed there only long enough to make sure that the frontier was guarded in a way that would make the chances very much against my getting across without some kind of help. Such help I knew that I could get in Belgium, and therefore, as the whole of the German railway system seemed to be at my disposal for night excursions, I decided to try my luck from that direction. I wanted to take a look at Essen and Krupps’ while I was so near, but finally concluded it would not be best to take a chance in a district where there were sure to be more on the watch than anywhere else. The distant tops of tall chimneys and a cloud of smoke in the sky were all that I saw of the “place where the war was made.” The Germans boast of a great intelligence system, yet not once--so far as I could see--was I under suspicion during the several days in which I made my leisurely way, by more or less indirect route, into Belgium. As a matter of fact, I did not give them very much to “lay hold of.” I kept closely to my original plan of steering clear of railway stations and hotels, and of asking for nothing in shops or restaurants that might require “tickets.” The weather was good, and most of my sleeping was done in about the same quiet sort of outdoor nooks as the American “hobo” seeks out in making his way across the continent. The only difference was that it was safer, if anything, in Germany, and many times when, in the States, I would have been greeted by a policeman’s club on the soles of my boots, I saw, from the tail of my eye, the “arm of the law” strut by without a second glance at the tired machinist, with his wrench beside him, dozing under a tree in a park or by the roadside. I had half a dozen good meals with kind-hearted peasants, and one night--it was raining, and I was pretty well played out--I accepted the offer of a bed in a farmhouse, the owner of which had a son who had a sheep ranch in Montana, near Miles City, a place where I had run a threshing outfit one season. He said he was very sorry that the boy had not been as clever as I was in evading the “Englanders” and getting home to help the Fatherland. He was a kind old fellow, and I tinkered up his mowing-machine and put a new valve