Whether they understood or were intimidated by my hard-looking appearance, I don't know, but certainly it would have to be a brave old man and boy who would start an argument with such a villainous-looking character as stood before them that night! I had not shaved for a month, my clothes were wet, torn, and dirty, my leggings were gone--they had got so heavy I had discarded them--my hair was matted, and my cheeks were flushed with fever. In my hand I carried the rock in my handkerchief, and I made no effort to conceal its presence or its mission. Anyway, they motioned me indoors and gave me my first hot meal in more than a month. True, it consisted only of warm potatoes. They had been previously cooked, but the old woman warmed them up in milk in one of the dirtiest kettles I had ever seen. I asked for bread, but she shook her head, although I think it must have been for lack of it rather than because she begrudged it to me. For if ever a man showed he was famished, I did that night. I swallowed those warm potatoes ravenously and I drank four glasses of water one after another. It was the best meal I had had since the "banquet" in the prison at Courtrai. The woman of the house was probably seventy-five years old and had evidently worn wooden shoes all her life, for she had a callous spot on the side of her foot the size of half a dollar, and it looked so hard that I doubt whether you could have driven a nail into it with a hammer. As I sat there drying myself--for I was in no hurry to leave the first human habitation I had entered in four weeks--I reflected on my unhappy lot and the unknown troubles and dangers that lay ahead of me. Here, for more than a month, I had been leading the life of a hunted animal--yes, worse than a hunted animal, for Nature clothes her less favored creatures more appropriately for the life they lead than I was clothed for mine--and there was not the slightest reason to hope that conditions would grow better. Perhaps the first warm food I had eaten for over a month had released unused springs of philosophy in me, as food sometimes does for a man. I pointed to my torn and water-soaked clothes and conveyed to them as best I could that I would be grateful for an old suit, but apparently they were too poor to have more than they actually needed themselves, and I rose to go. I had roused them out of bed, and I knew I ought not to keep them up longer than was absolutely necessary. As I approached the door I got a glance at myself in a mirror. I was the awfulest sight I had ever laid eyes on! The glimpse I got of myself startled me almost as much as if I had seen a dreaded German helmet! My left eye was fairly well healed by this time, and I was beginning to regain the sight of it, but my face was so haggard and my beard so long and unkempt that I looked like Santa Claus on a "bat."