As soon as the "gang of spies," as the policemen in the room now pleasantly called us, was complete, Tower, Schrape and Bouton were lined up against the wall and ordered to raise their hands above their heads, while their clothes were searched for concealed weapons or incriminating espionage evidence. While my fellow prisoners (except Mrs. Hensel) were undergoing examination, a typical young Berlin thug, evidently a thief, was brought in, and took his place adjacent to my colleagues, also to be searched. The room was now resounding with encouraging shouts from overwrought policemen that "the English dogs ought to be hanged." Others suggested that "Spandau," the spy-shooting gallery, was a more appropriate place for us than the gallows. For some God-willed or other mysterious reason I was not searched. That gave me only temporary relief, for we were presently informed that we would be taken to the Police-Presidency (central station) for the night and "dealt with there." That meant searching of everybody, I felt morally sure, and it was then that the tongue of me began cleaving to the roof of my mouth, while my throat parched with terror. For in a leather card-case in my inside pocket I carried a telegraph code, utterly innocuous in itself--a make-shift affair got up during the preceding forty-eight hours and of which I posted a duplicate to London, with a view to explaining to my editor in cipher my movements and whereabouts if I had suddenly to leave Berlin. It was a quite harmless string of phrases reading like this: "My wife’s condition has become critical, and physicians recommend immediate departure if catastrophe is to be avoided." All this was, of course, in German, and meant (as the code explained) that I was proceeding to the Hotel Angleterre in Copenhagen. Another phrase substituted "boy’s" for "wife’s" and meant that I was leaving for the Hotel Amstel in Amsterdam, etc., etc. It dawned instantly upon me that if the Berlin political police, at such a witching hour, discovered on a suspected spy a telegraphic code of so "incriminating" a character, he could hardly look forward to anything beyond the regulation thrill at sunrise. I might have been able to explain in prosaic peace-times, I soliloquized, that many newspaper correspondents use private codes in communicating with their editors, but to convince a Berlin police official at that moment that my code was of innocent import struck me as the quintessence of physical impossibility.