That the struggle had been won was evident from the quantities of ham, beef, potatoes, and bread which his wife served her habitual clients in the course of the evening. She seemed to have food hidden away in every nook and cranny of the house, like a miser his gold, and acknowledged its existence with the canniness of the South American Indian. As she lighted me to a comfortable bedchamber above, as clean as the lower story was disorderly, she remarked, apologetically: “If I had known in what purpose you were here I would not have sent you away when you first came. But another American food commissioner was in Velden just two days ago, a major who has his headquarters in Nürnberg. He came with a German captain, and they went fishing on the river.” In the morning she served me real coffee, with milk and white loaf sugar, two eggs, appealingly fresh, bread and butter, and an excellent cake—and her bill for everything, including the lodging, was six marks. In Berlin or Munich the food alone, had it been attainable, would have cost thirty to forty marks. Plainly it was advantageous to Velden to pose as suffering from food scarcity. The same species of selfishness was in evidence in the region round about. Not one of the several villages tucked away in the great evergreen forests of the “Fränkische Schweitz” through which my route wound that day would exchange foodstuffs of any species for mere money. When noon lay so far behind me that I was tempted to use physical force to satisfy my appetite, I entered the crude _Gasthaus_ of a little woodcutters’ hamlet. A family of nearly a dozen sat at a table occupying half the room, wolfing a dinner that gave little evidence of war-time scarcity. Here, too, there was an abundance of meat, potatoes, bread, and several other appetizing things. But strangers were welcome only to beer. Could one live on that, there would never be any excuse for going hungry in Bavaria. When I asked for food also the coarse-featured, bedraggled female who had filled my mug snarled like a dog over a bone and sat down with her family again, heaping her plate high with a steaming stew. I persisted, and she rose at last with a growl and served me a bowl of some kind of oatmeal gruel, liquid with milk. For this she demanded ten pfennigs, or nearly three-fourths of a cent. But if it was cheap, nothing could induce her to sell more of it. My loudest appeals for a second helping, for anything else, even for a slice of the immense loaf of bread from which each member of the gorging family slashed himself a generous portion at frequent intervals, were treated with the scornful silence with which the police sergeant might ignore the shouts of a drunken prisoner.