The capital was still plodding along with that hungry placidity which I had always found there. Surely it is the least exciting city of its size in the world, even in the midst of wars and revolutions! My total expenses during thirty-five days within unoccupied Germany summed up to three thousand marks, a less appalling amount than it would have been to a German, since the low rate of exchange reduced it to barely two hundred and fifty dollars. Of this—and the difference is worthy of comment—eighty dollars had been spent for food and only sixteen dollars for lodging. Transportation had cost me seventy dollars and the rest had gone for theater-tickets, photographic supplies, and the odds and ends that the traveler customarily picks up along the way more or less necessarily. There remained in my purse some five hundred marks in war-time “shin-plasters,” of scant value in the world ahead even were I permitted to carry them over the border. Unfortunately the best bargains in the Germany of 1919 were just those things that cannot be carried away—hotel rooms, railway and street-car tickets, public baths, cab and taxi rides, theater and opera seats and a few bulky commodities such as paper or books. Perhaps a connoisseur might have picked up advantageously art treasures, jewels, or the curiosities of medieval households, but for one without that training there was little choice but to follow the lead of all Allied officers leaving the capital and invest in a pair of field-glasses. The lenses for which Germany is famous had greatly risen in price, but by no means as much as the mark had fallen in foreign exchange. Only one episode broke the monotony of the swift express journey to the Holland border. I gained a seat in the dining-car at last, only to discover that the one possibly edible dish on the bill of fare cost two marks more than the few I had kept in German currency. To change a French or Dutch banknote would have meant to load myself down again with useless Boche paper money. Suddenly a brilliant idea burst upon me. In my bag there was still a block or two of the French chocolate which I had wheedled out of the American commissary in Berlin. I dug it up, broke off two inch-wide sections, and held them out toward a cheerful-looking young man seated on the floor of the corridor. “Would that be worth two marks to you?” I asked. “Two marks!” he shouted, snatching at the chocolate with one hand while the other dived for his purse. “Have you any more of it to sell?”