Miles ahead, over a mountainous ridge shaded by a cool and murmuring evergreen forest, I descended through the fields toward Beilngries, a reddish patch on the landscape ahead. A glass-clear brook that was almost a river hurried away across the meadow. I shed my clothes and plunged into it. A thin man was wandering along its grassy bank like a poet hunting inspiration or a victim of misfortune seeking solace for his tortured spirit. I overtook him soon after I had dressed. His garb was not that of a Bavarian villager; his manner and his speech suggested a Prussian, or at least a man from the north. I expected him to show more curiosity at sight of a wandering stranger than had the simple countrymen of the region. When I accosted him he asked if the water was cold and lapsed into silence. I made a casual reference to my walk from Munich. In any other country the mere recital of that distance on foot would have aroused astonishment. He said he had himself been fond of walking in his younger days. I implied in a conversational footnote that I was bound for Berlin. He assured me the trip would take me through some pleasant scenery. I emphasized my accent until a man of his class must have recognized that I was a foreigner. He remarked that these days were sad days for Germany. I worked carefully up to the announcement, in the most dramatic manner I could command, that I was an American recently discharged from the army. He hoped I would carry home a pleasant impression of German landscapes, even if I did not find the country what it had once been in other respects. As we parted at the edge of the town he deplored the scarcity and high price of food, shook hands limply, and wished me a successful journey. In other words, there was no means of arousing his interest, to say nothing of surprise or resentment, that the citizen of a country with which his own was still at war should be wandering freely with kodak and note-book through his Fatherland. His attitude was that of the vast majority of Germans I met on my journey, and to this day I have not ceased to wonder why their attitude should have been so indifferent. Had the whole country been starved out of the aggressive, suspicious manner of the Kaiser days, or was there truth in the assertion that they had always considered strangers honored guests and treated them as such? More likely the form of government under which they had so long lived had left the individual German the impression that personally it was no affair of his, that it was up to the officials who had appointed themselves over him to attend to such matters, while the government itself had grown so weak and disjointed that it took no cognizance of wandering strangers.