_Thursday, December 10th._ Soon after the train left Berlin this morning I judged that I was being shadowed. When it pulled out of the station there were four people, including myself, in the six-place compartment, the two middle seats being vacant, one on my left as I sat next the window and the other diagonally facing me. Soon after the train was well started two men came in and occupied these seats. This in itself was suspicious, since people do not seek seats while a train is in motion. Both moreover had the air of being detectives. I, by this time, know the type well, for I have been constantly shadowed ever since my arrival in Germany and am perfectly certain that my rooms have several times been searched while I was absent. I simply continued to behave with the greatest possible circumspection, the two detectives meanwhile staring at me constantly with fixed intensity. It was a bit unpleasant because I did not certainly know the nature of the dispatches I carried, but realized that they were extremely important. They were in a small leather mail pouch, padlocked and sealed, which I had set on the floor between my feet and knees. Everything went quietly for some two hours. I could not look out of the window in towns and yards because I might have seen troop-trains, factories, etc., and that would have been "indiscreet." The part of Germany from Berlin to Holland is utterly flat and uninteresting, so that there was no pleasure in looking at the countryside between stations. I pretended to doze, or read three German weeklies which I had bought. One of these finally precipitated matters. It was the _Fliegende Blätter_, a comic paper of about the class of _Life_ or _Punch_. There was in it a joke in German argot which had been too much for my scant knowledge of the language and the courier who had escorted me from the Embassy had by the merest hazard translated it for me. In my desperate efforts to amuse myself I was looking through this sheet again and encountering this joke thought, "If I don't write down the English I shall forget it." Whereupon I took out a pencil and wrote the translation interlinearly.