Personally, I did not go either to Hamburg or Bremen, being absent with parties visiting the Zeppelin stations at Nordholz and Tondern at the time the Shipping Board of the Naval Commission was inspecting British merchantmen interned in these once great ports. A member of that board, however, assured me that he had observed no material difference in the appearance of the people in the streets of Bremen and Hamburg and those of Wilhelmshaven. His party had taken "potluck" at the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg, where the food had been found ample in quantity and not unappetizing, even on a meatless day. "But what of the poor?" I asked. "Did you see anything of the quarters that would correspond to the slums of London or Liverpool?" "Germany," he replied, "to her credit, has very few places where the housing is outwardly so bad as in many British industrial cities I could name. We did not see much of the parts of Bremen and Hamburg where the working-classes live; but we did see a good deal of the workers themselves. I know under-feeding when I see it, for I was in Russia but a few months ago. But, so far as I could see, the chief difference between the men in the dockyards and shipbuilding establishments of Hamburg and those of the Tyne and Clyde was that the former were working harder. They merely glanced up at us as we passed, with little curiosity and no resentment, and went right on with the job in hand. No, everything considered, I should not say that any one is suffering seriously for lack of food in either Bremen or Hamburg." "No one is suffering seriously for lack of food." That was the feeling of all of us at the end of our first day in "starving Germany," and (if I may anticipate) it was also our verdict when the _Hercules_ sailed for England, three weeks later. IV ACROSS THE SANDS TO NORDERNEY