The Germans themselves took no steps to deny these stories, but in the prison we found a large collection of forlorn newsdealers.

Having been captured with the forbidden wares in their possession, they had mysteriously vanished from the ken of their friends; but they had not been "put against the wall," as they say in Europe.

They had been given fourteen days apiece, with a promise of six months if they transgressed a second time.
One little man, with the longest and sleekest and silkiest black whiskers I have seen in many a day, recognized us as Americans and drew near to tell us his troubles in a confidential whisper.

By his bleached indoor complexion and his manners anyone would have known him for a pastry cook or a hairdresser.

A hairdresser he was; and in a better day than this, not far remote, had conducted a fashionable establishment on a fashionable boulevard.
"Ah, I am in one very sad state," he said in his twisted English.