with women, girls, children, and a baby or two. I thought I recognised
one of the four terrors who had saluted me from the window, in a girl of
18 with a soiled slobby body huddling beneath its dingy dress; her bony
shoulders stifled in a shawl upon which excremental hair limply spouted;
a huge empty mouth; and a red nose, sticking between the bluish cheeks
that shook with spasms of coughing. Just inside the wire a figure
reminiscent of Gre, gun on shoulder, revolver on hip, moved monotonously.

The apparition hurried me through the gate, and along the wall into the
building, where instead of mounting the stairs he pointed down a long,
gloomy corridor with a square of light at the end of it, saying rapidly,
"Go to the promenade"--and vanished.

With the laughter of the Five still ringing in my ears, and no very clear
conception of the meaning of existence, I stumbled down the corridor;
bumping squarely into a beefy figure with a bull's neck and the familiar
revolver who demanded furiously: "What are you doing there? _Nom de
Dieu!_"--"_Pardon. Les douches_," I answered, quelled by the
collision.--He demanded in wrathy French "Who took you to the
douches?"--For a moment I was at a complete loss--then Fritz's remark
about the new _baigneur_ flashed through my mind: "Ree-shar" I answered
calmly.--The bull snorted satisfactorily. "Get into the _cour_ and hurry
up about it" he ordered.--"_C'est par la?_" I inquired politely.--He
stared at me contemptuously without answering; so I took it upon myself
to use the nearest door, hoping that he would have the decency not to
shoot me. I had no sooner crossed the threshold when I found myself once
more in the welcome air; and not ten paces away I espied B. peacefully
lounging, with some thirty others, within a _cour_ about one quarter the
size of the women's. I marched up to a little dingy gate in the
barbed-wire fence, and was hunting for the latch (as no padlock was in