cheerful. “I think we’re going to prison all right,” he assured me. 

 Braced by this news, poked from behind by my t-d, and waved on from before by M. le Ministre himself, I floated vaguely into a very washed, neat, business-like and altogether American room of modest proportions, whose door was immediately shut and guarded on the inside by my escort. 

 Monsieur le Ministre said: 

 “Lift your arms.” 

 Then he went through my pockets. He found cigarettes, pencils, a jack-knife and several francs. He laid his treasures on a clean table and said: “You are not allowed to keep these. I shall be responsible.” Then he looked me coldly in the eye and asked if I had anything else? 

 I told him that I believed I had a handkerchief. 

 He asked me: “Have you anything in your shoes?” 

 “My feet,” I said, gently. 

 “Come this way,” he said frigidly, opening a door which I had not remarked. I bowed in acknowledgment of the courtesy, and entered room number 2. 

 I looked into six eyes which sat at a desk. 

 Two belonged to a lawyerish person in civilian clothes, with a bored expression, plus a moustache of dreamy proportions with which the owner constantly imitated a gentleman ringing for a drink. Two appertained to a splendid old dotard (a face all ski-jumps and toboggan slides), on whose protruding chest the rosette of the Legion pompously squatted. Numbers five and six had reference to Monsieur, who had seated himself before I had time to focus my slightly bewildered eyes. 

 Monsieur spoke sanitary English, as I have said. 

 “What is your name?”—“Edward E. Cummings.” 

 —“Your second name?”—“E-s-t-l-i-n,” I spelled it for him.—“How do you say that?”—I didn’t understand.—“How do you say your name?”—“Oh,” I said; and pronounced it. He explained in French to the moustache that my first name was Edouard, my second “A-s-tay-l-ee-n,” and my third “Kay-umm-ee-n-gay-s”—and the moustache wrote it all down. Monsieur then turned to me once more: 

 “You are Irish?”—“No,” I said, “American.”—“You are Irish by family?”—“No, Scotch.”—“You are sure that there was never an Irishman in your parents?”—“So far as I know,” I said, “there 

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