was up to the officials who had appointed themselves over him to attend to such matters, while the government itself had grown so weak and disjointed that it took no cognizance of wandering strangers. Whatever else may be said of them, the Germans certainly are a hard-working, diligent people, even in the midst of calamities. Boys of barely fourteen followed the plow from dawn to dark of these long northern summer days. Laborers toiled steadily at road-mending, at keeping in repair the material things the Kaiser régime had left them, as ambitiously as if the thought had never occurred to them that all this labor might in the end prove of advantage only to their enemies. Except that the letters “P. G.” or “P. W.” were not painted on their garments, there was nothing to distinguish these gangs of workmen in fields and along the roads from the prisoners of war one had grown so accustomed to see at similar tasks in France. They wore the same patched and discolored field gray, the same weather-faded fatigue caps. How those red-banded caps had permeated into the utmost corners of the land! Between Beilngries and Bershing, two attractive towns with more than their share of food and comfort in the Germany of armistice days, I left the highway for the towpath of the once famous Ludwig Canal that parallels it. To all appearances this had long since been abandoned as a means of transportation. Nowhere in the many miles I followed it did I come upon a canal-boat, though its many locks were still in working order and the lock-tenders’ dwellings still inhabited. The disappearance of canal-boats may have been merely temporary, as was that of automobiles, of which I remember seeing only three during all my tramp in Germany, except those in the military service.