fourth-class coach on market-day. The throng it disgorged at Munich was sufficient to have peopled a town of very respectable size. I had made the sudden leap to the southern end of the Empire as a starting-point of a tramp across it instead of reversing the process in the hope that here at last I should find “something doing,” some remnants of excitement. Munich had just been snatched from the hands of the Sparticists—or the Bolshevists; the distinction between the two dreaded groups is not very clear in the German mind. Leviné, the half-mad Russian Jew who was reputed the organizing spirit of the revolt, was still dodging from one hiding-place to another somewhere in the vicinity. To read the breathless cables to the foreign press was to fancy Munich under a constant hail of shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. Ours was the second passenger-train that had ventured into the city in weeks. All Bavaria was blazing with huge posters, often blood-red in color, headed by the dread word “STANDRECHT” in letters to be seen a hundred yards away, proclaiming martial law and threatening sudden and dire fate to any one who strayed from the straight and narrow path of absolute submission to the “government-faithful” troops that were still pouring in from the north. Surely here, if anywhere, was a chance for a wandering American to get into trouble. Like so many dreadful things, however, martial law and beleaguered cities prove more terrible at a distance than on the spot. True, a group of soldiers in full fighting equipment held the station exit; but their only act of belligerency toward the invading throng was to hand each of us a red slip granting permission to walk the streets until two in the morning. A bedraggled hotel directly across the way spared me that necessity. The information its registry-pad required of guests was more exacting than its interior aspect, but neither here nor at the station exit was there any demand for proof of identity.