At least a dozen persons of both sexes came to ask me the same question before my brief dinner was over. Their eagerness aroused a curiosity to know just how much they would be willing to pay for so rare a delicacy. I opened my bag once more and, taking out the unopened half-pound that remained, laid it tantalizingly on the corner of my table. If eyes could have eaten, it would have disappeared more quickly than a scrap thrown among a flock of seagulls. When the likelihood of becoming the center of a riot seemed imminent, I rose to my feet. “_Meine Herrschaften_,” I began, teasingly, “in a few hours I shall be in Holland, where chocolate can be had in abundance. It would be a shame to take this last bar out of a country where it is so scarce. It is genuine French chocolate, no ‘war wares,’ So many of you have wished to buy it that I see no just way of disposing of it except to put it up at auction.” “Ah, the true American spirit!” sneered at least a half-dozen in the same breath. “Always looking for a chance to make money.” I ignored the sarcastic sallies and asked for bids. The offers began at ten marks, rose swiftly, and stopped a moment later at twenty-five. To a German that was still the equivalent of ten dollars. I regret to report that the successful bidder was a disgustingly fat Jewess who seemed least in need of nourishment of the entire carload. The cheerful-looking young man who had bought the first morsels had been eager to carry this prize to the fiancée he was soon to see for the first time since demobilization, but he had abandoned the race at twenty marks. “Now then, _meine Damen und Herren_,” I went on, haughtily, when the purchaser had tucked the chocolate into her jeweled arm-bag with a sybaritic leer and laid the specified sum before me, “I am no war-profiteer, nor have I the soul of a merchant. These twenty-five marks I shall hand to this gentleman opposite”—he had the appearance of one who could safely be intrusted with that amount—“with the understanding that he give it to the first _grand blessé_ he meets—the first soldier who has lost an arm, a leg, or an eye.”