The fatherly-looking Custom House officer who was examining our passports dropped his glasses and looked at me in astonishment. "And what were you doing in Berlin?" he asked, after a moment's pause. "Just a pleasure trip," was the answer, which perhaps did not satisfy him completely. He looked again at the passport, which was in perfect order, at the half-a-dozen seals, signatures, and Consulate stencils, Italian, Dutch, and German, which have occupied, during the last two weeks almost all the room left for the purpose on the dirty-looking, official piece of paper, and concluded philosophically, giving it back to me: "After all, some folk have got curious hobbies." Well, I really don't know if to go to Berlin from England in war time just to know what's going on is a curious hobby or not. But, when two weeks ago I read in some London newspaper wonderful stories of starvation and symptoms of panic in the German capital, and in some others that things in Berlin were going on just as usual, I thought the only way to know the truth about it was to go there myself. I was warned that I should get into trouble, be arrested, kept prisoner, treated as a spy, etc., and the few persons who knew of my journey thought it was a very foolish thing to do. As a matter of fact, the trip was carried out without much difficulty. Here is a summary of it: three days from London to Berlin (arrested once at Goch, a German frontier town, and once at Hanover); three days in Berlin (had to report to the police every morning and was arrested twice); three days from Berlin to Amsterdam, the only exciting diversion being a short arrest at Stendal. I would not exactly recommend an elderly lady to leave her easy chair in her Kensington sitting-room to start off on such a journey. But I enjoyed every moment of the trip. "What is then the present condition of Berlin? Did you find out the truth about what's going on there?" Everybody keeps asking me these questions. The answer cannot be given in a few words. Berlin, on the surface, is as usual; the life did not appear to me at first sight much different from what I saw during my last visit four years ago. London has changed her habits more on account of the war than Berlin. The theatres in the German capital are mostly open, the crowds in the street do not look much different from the peace-time crowds, the food-stuff prices are very little higher than usual. The women driving taxi-cabs, the starving queue outside the butchers' shops in the morning, and the potatoes sold at high price--these exist only in the dreams of newspaper correspondents.