“No, I am not exactly sick,” she explained, after all but toppling over upon me, “but my heart is so weak that it gives way when I try to work. I faint in the street every few hours and know nothing about it until I find myself in some shop door or alleyway where passers-by have carried me. The back of my head and my neck have ached for more than a year now, all the time, from the chin clear around. It is lack of food. I know where I could get plenty of meat, if I could pay for it and spend six or seven marks for a coach to get there.” “But you get American bacon now, don’t you?” I put in, more out of curiosity to know how she would answer than to get information. “Bacon!” she coughed. “Yes, indeed, one slice every two weeks! Enough to grease my tongue, if it needed it.” A moment later I chanced to mention Holland. She broke off a mumbling account of the horrors of war suffering at home with: “Holland! Isn’t that where our Kaiser is? Do you think our wicked enemies will do something wrong to his Majesty? Ah me, if only he would come back!” Like all her class, she was full of apologies for the deposed ruler and longed to bask once more in the blaze of his former glory, however far she was personally removed from it. Nor had her sufferings dimmed her patriotism. An evil-faced fellow at a neighboring table spat a stream of his alleged beer on the floor and shouted above the hubbub of maudlin voices: “_Ein Hundeleben ist das in Deutschland!_ A _dog’s_ life! Mine for a better country as quick as possible.” “Rats always desert a sinking ship,” snapped the old woman, glaring at the speaker with a display of her two yellow fangs, “no matter how well they have once fared upon it.”