The astonishingly well-dressed and orderly crowd of a thousand or more waiting outside the portal of the station in expectation of the arrival of a train-load of returning soldiers made no unfriendly demonstration of any character. On the contrary, indeed, as at Wilhelmshaven, a number of children waved their hands as our cars drove up, and a goodly number of men solemnly bared their heads as we filed past. The special which awaited us at a platform reached after walking through a long vaulted subway running beneath the tracks consisted, like the one we had left on the other side of the river, of an engine and two cars. The rolling stock of this one was in better shape than that of the other, however, and with a better maintained road-bed to run over, the last leg of our journey was covered at an average speed of over thirty miles an hour, quite the fastest we travelled by train anywhere in Germany. For the most of the way the line continued running through mile after mile of water-logged, sea-level areas crossed by innumerable drainage canals and bricked roadways gridironing possible inundation areas with their raised embankments. At the end of an hour, however, the patches of standing water disappeared, and presently the bulk of the great sheds of Nordholz began to notch the northern skyline, where they stood crowning the crest of the first rising ground in the littoral between the Dutch frontier and the Elbe. With only a minute or two of delay in the Nordholz yards, the train was switched to the airship station's own spur, and at the end of another mile had pulled up on a siding directly opposite the main entrance. The commander of the station, with two or three other officers, was waiting to receive us as we stepped out on the ground. Ranged up alongside this row of heel-clicking, frock-coated, be-medalled and be-sworded Zeppelin officers was an ancient individual of a type which seemed to recall the fatherly old Jehus of the piping days of Oberammergau. Every time the officers saluted, he raised his hat, bowed low from the waist, and exclaimed, "Good morning to you, gentlemen." When the last of us had been thus greeted, he called out a comprehensive, "This way to the carriages, gentlemen," and trotted off ahead, bell-wether fashion, through the gate. Here we found waiting four small brakes and a diminutive automobile, the sum total of the station's resources in rapid transit, according to the commander. Getting into the motor to precede us as pilot, he asked the party to dispose itself as best it could in the horse-drawn vehicles. Then, with old "Jehu" holding the reins of the first vehicle and men in air-service uniform--utter strangers to horses they were, too--tooling the other three, we started off along a well-paved road.