We were allowed to send out and buy a few things, but as most of the prisoners were without funds, this was but an empty privilege. Once I took advantage of the privilege to send my shoes to a Belgian shoemaker to be half-soled. They charged me twenty marks--five dollars! Once in a while a Belgian Ladies' Relief Society visited the prison and brought us handkerchiefs, American soap--which sells at about one dollar and fifty cents a bar in Belgium--tooth-brushes, and other little articles, all of which were American-made, but whether they were supplied by the American Relief Committee or not I don't know. At any rate, these gifts were mighty useful and were very much appreciated. One day I offered a button off my uniform to one of these Belgian ladies as a souvenir, but a German guard saw me and I was never allowed to go near the visitors afterward. The sanitary conditions in this prison-camp were excellent as a general proposition. One night, however, I discovered that I had been captured by "cooties." This was a novel experience to me and one that I would have been very willing to have missed, because in the Flying Corps our aerodromes are a number of miles back of the lines and we have good billets, and our acquaintance with such things as "cooties" and other unwelcome visitors is very limited. When I discovered my condition I made a holler and roused the guard, and right then I got another example of German efficiency. This guard seemed to be even more perturbed about my complaint than I was myself, evidently fearing that he would be blamed for my condition. The commandant was summoned, and I could see that he was very angry. Some one undoubtedly got a severe reprimand for it. I was taken out of my cell by a guard with a rifle and conducted about a quarter of a mile from the prison to an old factory building which had been converted into an elaborate fumigating plant. There I was given a pickle bath in some kind of solution, and while I was absorbing it my clothes, bedclothes, and whatever else had been in my cell were being put through another fumigating process. While I was waiting for my things to dry--it took, perhaps, half an hour--I had a chance to observe about one hundred other victims of "cooties"--German soldiers who had become infested in the trenches. We were all nude, of course, but apparently it was not difficult for them to recognize me as a foreigner even without my uniform on, for none of them made any attempt to talk to me, although they all were very busy talking _about_ me. I could not understand what they were saying, but I know I was the butt of most of their jokes, and they made no effort to conceal the fact that I was the subject of their conversation. When I got back to my cell I found that it had been thoroughly fumigated, and from that time on I had no further trouble with "cooties" or other visitors of the same kind.