in his leaking pump to square my account. There were a number of little incidents of this kind, and the simple kindliness of the old peasants I met--mostly fathers and mothers and wives with sons or husbands in the war--was responsible for the fact that I did not feel quite as harshly against Huns in general when I left their country as when I entered it. Still, I know very well that their good treatment of me was only because they thought I was one of themselves, and that they would probably have given me up to a mob to tear to pieces if they had suspected for a minute what I really was. I went through into Belgium on the brake-beams of a fast freight which, from the way it seemed to have the right-of-way over passengers, I concluded was carrying munitions urgently needed at the front. It was slowed down in some kind of a traffic jam at a junction when I boarded it, but when I left it--when I thought I was as far into Belgium as I wanted to go--it was hitting up a lively thirty miles an hour or more, and all my practice at the game could not save me from a nasty roll. Luckily, I dropped clear of the ties; and as the fill was of soft earth, with a ditch full of water at the bottom, I was not much the worse for a fall that would have brained me a dozen times over on most American lines. Of how I got out of Belgium into Holland, and finally on to England, it would not do for me to write anything at all at this time, beyond saying that it was entirely due to aid that I had from the Belgians themselves. One of the most interesting chapters of the war will be the one--not to be published till all is over--telling how Belgian patriots in Belgium not only kept touch with each other during the German occupation, but also contrived to send news--and even go and come themselves--to the outer world. Even the “electric fence” along the Holland boundary has no terrors for them, and I am giving away no secret when I say that there are more ways of getting safely under or over that fence than there are wires in it. It will probably do no harm for me to say that _I_ crossed this barrier on a very cleverly made little folding stairway which when not in use, was kept hidden under a square of sod but a few feet away from the fence itself. The genial old German sentry who spread it for me--he had, of course, been liberally bribed, and probably had some regular “working arrangement” with my Belgian friends--confided to me at parting that, when he had accumulated enough money to keep him comfortably the rest of his life in Holland, he intended to climb over that little stairway himself and never go back. I have often wondered how many other Germans feel the same about leaving “the sinking ship.” THE SINGING SOLDIER I