There was something more than mere curiosity in his voice, though his tone could not quite have been called angry. It was more nearly the German official guttural. I smiled placidly as I answered, throwing in a hint, as usual, about the food commission. He was instantly mollified. He did not even suggest seeing my papers, though he announced himself the traveling police force of that region, covering some ten small towns. Within five minutes we were as deep in conversation as if we had discovered ourselves to be friends of long standing. He was of a naturally sociable disposition, like all Bavarians, and his sociability was distinctly enhanced when I shared with him my last nibble of chocolate and “split” with him one of my rare American cigars. He had not had a smoke in a week, not even an _Ersatz_ one; and it was at least a year since he had tasted chocolate. In return for my appalling sacrifice he insisted on presenting me with the two eggs he had been able to “hamster” during that day’s round of duty. When I handed them to the caisson-built landlady with instructions to serve us one each in the morning, my relations with the police-soldier were established on a friendly basis for life. Before bedtime we had reached the point where he turned his revolver over to me, that I might satisfy my curiosity as to its inner workings. In return I spread all but one of my official and pseudo-official papers out before him in the flickering light of the grease wick, not because he had made any formal request to see them, but that I might keep him amused, as one holds the interest of a baby by flashing something gaudy before it or holding a ticking watch to its ear. Not, let it be plainly understood, that my new friend was of low intellectual level. Far from it. A Nürnberger of twenty-five who had seen all the war, on several fronts, he was judicious and “keen,” quite equal to his new position as country gendarme. But there is something naïve, babylike in the Bavarian character even after it has been tempered and remolded by wide and varied experience.