gun, and with a wave of his hand invited us to partake of the
hospitalities of the place. We looked about us, and lo! we were hard-
and-fast in jail!

I have been in pleasanter indoor retreats in my time, even on rainy
afternoons. The room was bedded down ankle-deep in straw; and the
straw, which had probably been fresh the day before, already gave off a
strong musky odor--the smell of an animal cage in a zoo.

For furnishings, the place contained a bench and a large iron pot
containing a meat stew, which had now gone cold, so that a rime of gray
suet coated the upper half of the pot. But of human occupants there was
an ample sufficiency, considering the cubic space available for
breathing purposes. Sitting in melancholy array against the walls, with
their legs half buried in the straw and their backs against the
baseboards, were eighteen prisoners--two Belgian cavalrymen and sixteen
Frenchmen--mostly Zouaves and chasseurs-a-pied. Also, there were three
Turcos from Northern Africa, almost as dark as negroes, wearing red
fezzes and soiled white, baggy, skirtlike arrangements instead of
trousers. They all looked very dirty, very unhappy and very sleepy.

At the far side of the room on a bench was another group of four
prisoners; and of these we knew two personally--Gerbeaux, a Frenchman
who lived in Brussels and served as the resident Brussels correspondent
of a Chicago paper; and Stevens, an American artist, originally from
Michigan, but who for several years had divided his time between Paris
and Brussels. With them were a Belgian photographer, scared now into a
quivering heap from which two wall-eyes peered out wildly, and a negro
chauffeur, a soot-black Congo boy who had been brought away from Africa
on a training ship as a child. He, apparently, was the least-concerned