It was with difficulty that we found seats in the crowded café, large as it was. A throng of men and women, somewhat less buoyant than similar gatherings in Paris, was sipping beer and wine at the marble-topped tables. A large orchestra played rather well in a corner. Seidels of good beer cost us less than they would have in New York two years before. The bourgeois gathering looked at us rather fixedly, a bit languidly. I started to light a cigar, but could not find my matches. A well-dressed man of middle age at the next table leaned over and lighted it for me. Two youthful students in their gay-colored caps grinned at us rather flippantly. A waiter hovered about us, bowing low and smirking a bit fatuously whenever we spoke to him. There was no outward evidence to show that we were among enemies. Still there was no wisdom in playing too long with fire, once the initial pleasure of the game had worn off. It would have been hard to explain to our own people how we came to be in Frankfurt, even if nothing worse came of another demand for our passes. Uncle Sam would never suffer for the loss of that “Dodge,” but he would be quite apt to show extensive inquisitiveness to know who lost it. The late afternoon promenade at the Kurhaus back in Wiesbaden was said to be very interesting. We paid our reckoning, tipped our tip, and wandered casually back to the square graced by the bronze young man whose equipment had gone astray. To say that we were surprised to find the car waiting where we had left it, the doughboy-chauffeur dozing in his seat, would be putting it too strongly. But we were relieved. The Kurhaus promenade was not what it was “cracked up to be,” at least not that afternoon. But we may have been somewhat late. The opera, beginning at six, was excellent, lacking something of the lightness of the same performance in Paris, but outdoing it in some details, chiefly in its mechanical effects. One looked in vain for any suggestion of under-nourishment in the throng of buxom, “corn-fed” women and stodgy men who crowded the house and the top-heavily decorated foyer during the _entr’actes_. Frenchmen in uniform, from generals to _poilus_, gave color to the rather somber audience and made no bones of “fraternizing” with the civilians—particularly if she chanced to be beautiful, which was seldom the case. American officers were numerous; there were Englishmen, “Anzacs,” Belgians, Italians, and a Serb or two. The after-theater dinner at the Kurhaus was sumptuous, except in one detail; neither bribery nor pleading could win us the tiniest slice of the black war-bread that was stintingly served to those with bread-tickets. Otherwise “wine, women, and song” were as much in evidence as if war had never come to trouble the worldly pleasures of Wiesbaden.