A man stepped out of the cabin. "I presume, sir, that you are the American journalist," he said. He explained that he was the steward. From the bridge came the voice of the captain, "We can give them only a few minutes more," he said. Two minutes of silence, broken only by the gentle throbbing of the engines. Then from the blackness near the street gate came the sound of hurrying feet. I could make out three stumbling figures, apparently urged along by a fourth. "Who are they?" I asked the steward. "They must be the three Tommies who escaped from Germany. Brave lads they are. A couple more days and we'll have them hack in England." "A couple of days?" I exclaimed. "Why, it's only eight hours to the Thames estuary, isn't it?" "Eight hours in peace time; and eight hours for Dutch boats now--when the Germany don't kidnap them away to Zeebrugge. But the course to the Thames is not our course. The old fourteen-hour trip to Hull often takes us forty now. Every passage is different, too. It isn't only on the sea that the Germans try to bother us; they also keep after us when we are in port here. Only yesterday the Dutch inspectors did us a good turn by arresting five spies monkeying around the boat--three Germans and two Dutchmen." The little vessel was headed into the stream now, the three Tommies had gone inside, followed a little later by the two men who were on the deck when I arrived, men who talked French. When the steward left I was alone on the deck. I watched the receding lights of Rotterdam till they flickered out in the distance. The night was misty and too dark to make out anything on shore. My thoughts went back to the last time, nearly a year before, when I had been on that river. I saw it then, in flood of moonlight as I stepped on the boat deck of the giant liner _Rotterdam_. The soft strains of a waltz floated up from the music room, adding enchantment to the windmills and low Dutch farmhouses strung out below the level of the water.