The taking of his testimony was a proceeding held in a small side apartment before an elderly crotchety underling who pretended to understand English and French, but whose thick-wittedness seemed monumental. The slowness and dullness indicated a whole summer's programme of this preposterous horseplay. Everything was being written down in detail in long hand in the form of questions and answers. All Deming's candles, soiled linen, stained napkins and what-not, reported from all directions of the Empire, began to be raked over. There were green, yellow, red, blue telegrams from half the German States. Harassed by this muck and by the leering taunts of the old party, Jim was glad to find, at the noon hour, that the session was postponed to the second day after. As he was leaving the room, another offensive inquiry about an absurdity caused him suddenly to remember Mr. Anderson's advice. And in one immortal moment in his existence he rose to a sublime height of moral courage. "Go to hell!" he shot back. And as he saw the clumsy servitor beginning to pen "Answer: Go to h----" in his great book, Jim slipped out. He briskly hunted a lawyer to whom he related all the circumstances, winding up elatedly with the last remark. "Did they write that down too?" "Yes." The attorney was at first convulsed, familiar with Teuton naivete. Then he dubiously shook his head. To Jim's unexpected discomfort the affair was regarded seriously. If he had not ejaculated this affront, something could be done. But now he had been guilty of what the Germans might rightfully construe as a voluntary indignity offered to the Imperial Secret Service in the performance of its highly responsible duties. If he wanted to avoid important trouble, the only simple and effective course would be to quit the country. He could leave that night and in not many hours would be in Russia and beyond German control. And so Jim Deming made a hasty and unceremonious exit from the Deutschland he had been so fond of, without having time to salute any of his many friends good-by. He had to send them a line of farewell from St. Petersburg. "Here you have German bureaucracy in its full flower and odor," remarked Anderson as he recounted the affair to Kirtley. "It flourishes to a great extent by exaggerating mole hills into mountains with officious vacuity. It is so large that there is not enough serious work for it. So something often must be found to do. It is a civil army radiating the glory of the Kaiser. The more extensive it is, the more entrenched he is. It is official dry rot which is part of the price the people pay for having themselves governed. It is national graft. But while our American forms of graft at least stimulate individual cleverness among our compatriots, this German form tends to reduce its recipients to the level of donkeys, as seen in the Deming case." Gard little suspected that he was to drift into a somewhat similar misadventure, but of an advanced type.