t for him." And this, you must remember,
was from a woman whose support was cut off by the war and who was making
a living by sewing shirts at twelve and a half cents a shirt.

I walked down the busy High Street that night in Cologne, and the bright
shop-windows with their chocolates and fruit--apples from Canada and
Hood River--crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow
streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through
in November. There are, indeed, many French suggestions in Cologne, and
in the shops they still sometimes call an umbrella a parapluie.

An American who lives in Cologne told me that the decrease in the number
of young men was noticeable, and that eleven sons of his friends had
been killed. To a stranger the city looked normal, with the usual
crowds. One did notice the people about the war bulletin-boards. They
were not boys and street loungers, but grave-looking citizens and their
wives and daughters, people who looked as if they might have sons or
brothers at the front.

The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through Essen, where the Krupp
guns are made, the coal and iron country of Westphalia, and the plains
of the west. It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost
touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon.
All these chimneys were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course,
why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing going on--if not as
usual, at any rate going on.

The muddy plains between the factory towns were green with winter wheat,
the crop which is to carry the country through another year. Meanwhile,
one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not
needed for beets--for with no sugar going out Germany can produce more
now than she needs--also be seeded to wheat.

Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, but in the complex
web of a modern city it is rather hard to tell just what that means: In
ordinary times, for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million
dollars' worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, of course, is not
coming in now, yet butter seems to appear, and at a central place like
the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and
Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve
and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost
before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from