emerged presently wearing an appallingly ugly green mackintosh reeking
hideously of rubber. It was a shocking garment but I reflected that I
was a German and must choose my garb accordingly.

Outside the shop I nearly ran into a little man who was loafing in the
doorway. He was a wizened, scrubby old fellow wearing a dirty peaked cap
with a band of tarnished gold. I knew him at once for one of those
guides, half tout, half bully, that infest the railway termini of all
great Continental cities.

"Want a guide, sir?" the man said in German.

I shook my head and hurried on. The man trotted beside me. "Want a good,
cheap hotel, sir? Good, respectable house.... Want a ..."

"Ach! gehen sie zum Teufel!" I cried angrily. But the man persisted,
running along beside me and reeling off his tout's patter in a wheezing,
asthmatic voice. I struck off blindly down the first turning we came to,
hoping to be rid of the fellow, but in vain. Finally, I stopped and held
out a gulden.

"Take this and go away!" I said.

The old fellow waved the coin aside.

"Danke, danke," he said nonchalantly, looking at the same time to right
and left.

Then he said in a calm English voice, utterly different from his whining
accents of a moment before: