There was one thing that steel-tyred car did well, though, and that was to respond to its emergency brake. The occasion for the use of the latter arose when a turning bridge was suddenly opened fifteen or twenty yards ahead of the leading car, imposing upon the latter the necessity of stopping dead inside that distance or taking a header into a canal. The Mercedes, skating airily along on its wobbly tyres, managed it by inches after streaking the pavement with two broad belts of the last "real tree rubber" left in Germany. The leading nondescript--the Benz-Daimler blend--gave the Mercedes a sharp bump before losing the last of its momentum, and all but the last of its fluttering "rope-_ersatz_-rubber" tyres, while its mate only came to a standstill after skidding sideways on its rims. But my steel-tyred chariot, the instant its emergency brake was thrown on, simply set its teeth into the red brick pavement, and, spitting sparks like a dragon, stopped as dead as though it had run against a stone wall. My companion and I, having nothing to set _our_ teeth into, simply kept going right on. I, luckily, only butted the chauffeur, who--evidently because the same thing had happened to him before--took it all in good part; but the dapper young officer, who planted the back of his head squarely between the shoulder blades of the august Workmen's and Soldiers' representative riding beside the driver, got a good swearing at for not aiming lower and allowing the back of the seat to absorb his inertia. Quite apart from the sparks kicked up by the tyres, and the stars shaken down by my jolt, it was a highly illuminating little incident. We ran more slowly after we crossed the bridge--which also meant more quietly, or rather, less noisily--and for the first time I noticed what a new world we seemed to have come into since we left the immediate vicinity of the docks. It was not so much that we were now passing down a street of small shops, where before we had been among warehouses and factories, as the difference in appearance and spirit of the people. No one--not even the labourer going to his morning work--had anything of the slovenly hang-dog air of the sailors we had seen in the ships and about the dockyard. The streets and the shops were clean, and even the meanest of the people neatly and comfortably dressed. We had come out of the atmosphere of revolution into that of ordinary work-a-day Germany.