Fifteen kilometers from the capital I stopped at a crossroads _Gasthaus_, quite prepared to hear my suggestion of food answered with a sneer. Two or three youthful ex-soldiers still in uniform sat at one of the bare wooden tables, sipping the inevitable half-liter mugs of beer. I ordered one myself, not merely because I was thirsty, but because that is the invariable introduction to any request in a Bavarian inn. As the ponderous but neat matron set the foaming glass before me with the never-lacking “May it taste well!” I opened preliminaries on the food question, speaking gently, lest so presumptive a request from a total stranger awaken the wrath of the discharged soldiers. Mine hostess had no such misgivings. In a voice as loud and penetrating as my own had been inarticulate she bade me explain my desires in detail. I huskily whispered eggs, fried eggs, a plebeian dish, perhaps, in the land of my birth, but certainly a greater height of luxury in Germany than I had yet attained. I quail still at the audacity of that request, which I proffered with an elbow on the alert to protect my skull from the reply by physical force I more than half expected. Instead she made not a sound, after the manner of Bavarian innkeepesses when taking orders, and faded heavily but noiselessly away in the direction of the kitchen. A few minutes later I beheld two _Spiegeleier_ descending upon me, not merely real eggs, but of that year’s vintage. One of them alone might have been an astonishment; a whole pair of them trotting side by side as if the Kaiser had never dreamed how fetching the letters Rex Mundis would look after his name was all but too much for me. I caught myself clinging to the bench under me as one might to the seat of an airplane about to buck, or whatever it is ships of the air do when they feel skittish. A whole plateful of boiled potatoes bore the regal couple attendance, and a generous slab of almost edible bread, quite unlike a city helping both in size and quality, brought up the rear. When I reached for a fifty-mark note and asked for the reckoning the hostess went through a laborious process in mental arithmetic and announced that, including the two half-liters of beer, I was indebted to the extent of one mk. twenty-seven! In the slang of our school-days, “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” particularly as four hours earlier, back in a modest Munich hotel, I had been mulcted twelve marks for an _Ersatz_ breakfast of “coffee, bread, marmalade,” and four very thin slices of ham.