As I turned to go he took his leave with a mixture of deference and friendliness. He had not asked to see the papers bearing out all these statements I had been making, but there was a hint in the depth of his eyes that he felt it his duty to do so, if only he could venture to make such a demand of so highly placed a personage. I went far enough away to make sure he would not have the courage to demand them—which would have been his first act had I approached him as a mere traveler—then turned back, drawing the documents from a pocket as if I had just thought of them. He glanced at them in a most apologetic manner, protesting the while that of course he had never for an instant doubted my word, and returned them with a deferential bow. All in all, this plan of posing as an official scout of the “Amerikanische Lebensmittel Kommission” had been a brilliant idea, marked with a success that moved me to use the same innocent ruse a score of times when any other means of gathering information might have been frustrated. One must have a reasonable excuse for traveling on foot in Germany. To pretend to be doing so for lack of funds would be absurd, since fourth-class fare costs an infinitesimal sum, much less than the least amount of food one could live on for the same distance. The only weakness in my simple little trick was the frequent question as to why the Americans who had sent me out on my important mission had not furnished me a bicycle. The German roads were so good; one could cover so much more ground on a _Fahrrad_.... Driven into that corner, there was no other defense but to mumble something about how much more closely the foot traveler can get in touch with the plain people, or to take advantage of some fork in the conversation to change the subject.