The expressions of praise that arose on all sides grew maudlin. The trustee I had chosen ceremoniously wrote his address on a visiting-card and handed it to the Jewess, requesting hers in return, and promising to forward a receipt signed by the recipient of the “noble American benefaction.” Then he fell into conversation with me, learned the purpose that had brought me to Germany, and implored me to continue to Essen with him, where he was connected with the Krupp factories. He would see to it that I was received by Herr von Krupp-Bohlen himself—the husband of Frau Bertha whom the Kaiser had permitted to saddle himself with the glorious family name—and that I be conducted into every corner of the plant, a privilege which had been accorded no Allied correspondent since the war began. His pleas grew almost tearful in spite of my reminder that time and transatlantic steamers wait for no man. The world, he blubbered, had a wholly false notion of the great Krupps of Essen. They were really overflowing with charity. Were they not paying regular wages to almost their war-time force of workmen, though there was employment for only a small fraction of them? It was high time a fair-minded report wiped out the slanders that had been heaped upon a noble family and establishment by the wicked Allied propagandists. Essen at least would never be troubled with labor agitators and Sparticist uprisings.... We reached Bentheim on the frontier at four. Most of my companions of the chocolate episode had been left behind with the change of cars at Löhne, and the coaches now disgorged a throng of fat, prosperous-looking Hollanders. War and suffering, after all, are good for the soul, one could not but reflect, at the sudden change from the adversity-tamed Germans to these gross, red-faced, paunchy, overfed Dutchmen, who, though it be something approaching heresy to say so, perhaps, were far less agreeable to every sense, who had something in their manner that suggested that their acquaintance was not worth cultivating. My last chance for a German adventure had come. Unless the frontier officials at Bentheim visited their wrath upon me in some form or other, my journey through the Fatherland would forever remain like the memory of a Sunday-school picnic in the crater of an extinct volcano—a picnic to which most of the party had neglected to bring their lunch-baskets, and where the rest had spilled their scant fare several times in the sand and ashes along the way.