some reply learned by heart from his books. The stone-headed group listened motionless until long after his voice had died away, and drifted back into their silent, automatic beer-drinking. It was, of course, as much bashfulness as stupidity that held them dumb. Peasants the world over are more or less chary of expressing themselves before strangers, before “city people,” particularly when their dialect differs considerably from the cultured form of their language. But what seemed queerest in such groups as these was their utter lack of curiosity, their apparently complete want of interest in anything beyond their own narrow sphere. They knew I was an American, they knew I had seen much of the other side of the struggle that had oppressed them for nearly five years and brought their once powerful Fatherland close to annihilation. Yet they had not a question to ask. It was as if they had grown accustomed through generations of training to having their information delivered to them in packages bearing the seal of their overlords, and considered it neither advantageous nor seemly to tap any other sources they came upon in their life’s journey. Very gradually, as the evening wore on, the landlord’s replies to my queries reached the length of being informative. Velden, he asserted, was a Protestant community; there was not a Catholic in town, nor a Jew. On the other hand, Neuhaus, a few miles beyond, paid universal homage to Rome. With a population of one hundred and seventy families, averaging four to five each now, or a total of eight hundred, Velden had lost thirty-seven men in the war, besides three times that many being seriously wounded, nearly half of them more or less crippled for life. Then there were some fifty prisoners in France, whom they never expected to return. The Allies would keep them to rebuild the cities the Germans had destroyed—and those the Allied artillery had ruined, too; that was the especially unfair side of it. No, he had not been a soldier himself—he was barely forty and to all appearances as powerful as an ox—because he had been more useful at home. His family had not exactly suffered, though the schools had become almost a farce, with all the teachers at war. Women? Faugh! How can women teach boys? They grow up altogether too soft even under the _strengest_ of masters. As to food; well, being mostly peasants, they probably had about a hundred pounds of fat or meat where two hundred or so were needed. But it was a constant struggle to keep the “hamsterers” from carrying off what the town required for its own use.