It was raining and it was cold. Joe and Howard were in the front seat, Joe driving and Howard studying the road map. I was in the back seat, catching cold. “We’ll go right ahead,” said Joe, “to Such and Such a Place, and there we’ll stop and have lunch.” Well, we stopped in Such and Such a Place, but it was not from a desire of lunch. It was because we were compelled to stop. “Let’s see your papers,” said the stopper in French. The stoppees, in English, displayed their passes to the American camp. The stopper didn’t know whether they were good or not. He asked us to wait a moment and disappeared out of the rain. We waited several moments. Finally there appeared another stopper, who read carefully our passes and told us they were no good and that we would have to loom up at the City Hall. We went there, with Joe and Howard in the front seat and an officer and I in the back, me still catching cold, especially in the feet. In the City Hall were French officers attired in all colors of the French army, which made the colors of the rainbow look like Simon Pure White. Our crime, it seems, was in not having an automobile pass on a red card. Or maybe it was blue. One of the thirty gentlemen in charge said we would have to wait till he telephoned back to Paris. Knowing the French telephone system, we inquired whether we might go across the street and eat. We were told we might. We went across the street and ate, and it was a good meal, with meat, on a day which was meatless in Paris. A subaltern interrupted the orgy and said we were wanted back in the City Hall. Back there the startling information was that no telephonic satisfaction had been obtained. We asked whether we might go back to the café. There was no objection. We played pitch. French soldiers by scores came up and looked on. Joe thought, sub rosa, that it would be a grand idea to startle ’em. So we played pitch for one hundred francs a hand, it being tacitly understood that the money didn’t go. But we certainly had them excited. Between pitch games in which thousands of francs were apparently lost and won, we visited, on summons, the City Hall five or six times. Every time there was the same heavy barrage of français. Entered, finally, an English-speaking gent who said we might leave the city provided we went straight back to Paris. “We’d much prefer,” said Joe, “to go on to where we were going.” “You have the choice,” was the reply, “of returning to Paris or remaining here, in jail.” Paris sounded the more attractive. They gave us back our car and away we went. It was after twenty o’clock, and it was pitch dark, and it was cold, and it was raining. And the man who had made the machine had forgotten to equip it with headlights.