Soon after the Amtmann had gone, the warder brought me my dinner in a dinner-pail. He left it with me and disappeared. The food was certainly the best I had ever received from German authorities at any time. The pot was full of excellent potatoes in brown, greasy onion gravy. A decent-sized piece of hot, home-made sausage lay on top. I was very hungry, but so excited that I was half-way through the mess before I realized that I was merely swallowing it down without tasting a bit of it. That was sheer ingratitude, and thereafter I went ahead slowly, thoroughly enjoying it. The pot was empty far too soon; a second edition would have been very acceptable. I complimented the warder on the excellent fare in his prison. “I told my wife about you,” he acknowledged, “and she said we ought to give you a decent dinner anyway.” When I had finished I thought the time favorable to begin operations. After a substantial Sunday dinner--there was evidently no shortage of food in that part of Germany as yet--the village was bound to be more or less somnolent. Indeed, no sound was to be heard from the street. The first thing was to make a thorough inspection of the ceiling. If one could get into the loft the roof would offer little resistance, it being, as I had seen, tiled in the ordinary way. Where the splinter had broken off, two boards appeared affected by dry-rot, a narrow one and a wider one next to it. Tentatively I pushed against the narrow one near the end which was nailed to the beam. There was some spring there, not the firm resistance of a sound board well nailed home. Under the slowly increased pressure it suddenly gave with a creak, and a shower of splinters and dust came down upon me and the bed. I could now look into the loft and see the under side of the tiles. Directly in line with my eyes was a hole where a tile had lost its upper half. This would be the place to attack, once through the ceiling. In the meantime the sun shone through another hole which I could not see, and, through the crack upon my bed. To pull the board back into its original position had no effect. Where there had been a narrow crack in the morning another splinter had become detached, and there was the scintillating beam of light cleaving a path through the dust motes, a traitorous tell-tale. After a moment’s thought, I rolled my oilsilks into a long sausage and shoved it past the raised board into the loft in such a fashion that it would roll over the crack when the board was lowered. It worked, and after a critical inspection I decided that none but an exceptionally observant individual would ever notice that the ceiling had been tampered with.