Some of the supplies to which the tickets entitled me must be purchased on the spot, in specified shops scattered about the neighboring streets. That was a matter of a few minutes, for the shopkeepers already had them wrapped in tiny packages of the allotted size. There was a half-pound of sugar, coarse-grained, but nearly white; then a bar of sandy soap of the size of a walnut. My week’s supply of butter I tucked easily into a safety-match box and ate with that day’s lunch. Three coupons on an elaborate card entitled “American Foodstuffs” yielded four ounces of lard (in lieu of bacon), two ounces of what seemed to be tallow, and a half-pound of white flour. The price of the entire collection, being government controlled, was reasonable enough, especially in view of the foreign rate of exchange; a total of two mk. eighty, or less than the butter alone would have cost from “underground” dealers. Fortunately the meat, potato, and bread tickets were good anywhere, sparing me the necessity of carrying these supplies with me. In fact, _Reisebrotmarken_, or “travel bread-tickets,” were legal tender throughout the Empire, and were not confined to any particular date or place. Those I had been furnished for a month to come, a whole sheath of them, totaling twenty-five hundred grams. That sounds, perhaps, like a lot of bread, but the fact is that each elaborately engraved fifty-gram coupon represented a thin slice of some black concoction of bran, turnip-meal, and perhaps sawdust which contained little more nourishment and was far less appetizing in appearance than the ticket itself. The potato-tickets were invaluable; without them one was either denied the chief substance of a Berlin meal or forced to pay a painful price for an illegal serving of it; with them one could obtain two hundred and fifty grams for a mere thirty pfennigs. Other vegetables, which were just then beginning to appear on bills of fare, were not subject to ticket regulation. The white flour left me with a problem equal to that I had been to the _Brotcommissionen_. Obviously I could not afford to waste such a luxury; quite as obviously I could not eat it raw. In the end I turned it over to the head waiter of my hotel, together with the lard, and breakfasted next morning on two long-enduring _Pfannkuchen_. But the go-between charged me a mark for his trouble, three marks for two eggs, without which a German “pancake” is a failure, and a mark for the cooking!