e Continent.

"The captain is not here. We go to the commissaire at headquarters,"
said the polite politzei. It was then that we cut loose, told him to
bring the commissaire or the burgomaster to us, and started to walk off.
It was a bad move. So far he had handled us with a velvet grip, but at
the first sign of insurrection he showed his teeth, locked arms with
each of us, and, signaling another officer to follow, forthwith marched
us off to police headquarters and our ultimate resting-place, the
guardroom cell.

How long we stayed there I don't know--long enough, at all events,
to get a glimpse of the Dutch police system and the third degree as
practiced in the Lowlands. There swung open a great iron door
leading to the street and the market-place, not so large but fully as
busy as Washington Market the week before Thanksgiving. Through
it, sobbing and screaming, their hats gone and their hair torn, came
two women, roughly handled by gendarmes and followed by a mob
escort. They were thrown weeping and expostulating into an adjoining
cell. A gendarme came out with trickles of blood on his face. He
mopped his brow and complained of feminine finger-nails. Close
behind him followed a male friend of the imprisoned women. He
pleaded with the sergeant at the desk, while the moans of the
women, under pressure to confess their crime, came from their cell.
But Jack Rose only scratched and scratched monotonously, and now
and then gazed at the middle of the speaker's stomach.

In the mean time we fell back into our habit of talking for publication.
With an intimacy that would have surprised those gentlemen we
referred casually to Brand Whitlock, Dr. van Dyke, and the biggest
Dutch and Belgian names we could think of. We suspected that Jack
Rose and the man at our side understood more English than they
pretended. At all events, it had its effect. In half an hour we were
taken before the commissioner.

Two cigars lay on the edge of the table nearest us. I could see at a
glance that we were free.

"Do you speak English?" I asked him.

"No," he answered in our native tongue; "only French, Flemish,
German, and Italian--but not English." And with a grin he asked for
our passports.

"You are for the American newspapers?"

"Yes," I answered--"one of us is a lawyer who writes occasionally. I
am correspondent for a New York and a Boston paper, but I won't
cable anything from here." For this reason, I explained, no