it on pieces or, rather, chunks of the brownish bread whose faintly rotten odour is one element of the life at La Ferté
which I, for one, find it easier to remember than to forget. And next, in
similar fashion, we opened the cheese and offered some to our visitor;
and finally the chocolate. Whereupon The Zulu rose up, thanked us
tremendously for our gifts, and—winking solemnly—floated off.
Next day he told us that he wanted us to eat all of the delicacies we had purchased, whether or not he happened to be in the vicinity. He also informed us that when they were gone we should buy more until the twenty francs gave out. And, so generous were our appetites, it was not more than two or three weeks later that The Zulu having discovered that our supplies were exhausted produced from his back hair a neatly folded twenty franc note; wherewith we invaded the canteen with renewed violence. About this time The Spy got busy and The Zulu, with The Young Pole for interpreter, was summoned to Monsieur le Directeur, who stripped The Zulu and searched every wrinkle and crevice of his tranquil anatomy for money (so The Zulu vividly informed us)—finding not a sou. The Zulu, who vastly enjoyed the discomfiture of Monsieur, cautiously extracted (shortly after this) a twenty franc note from the back of his neck, and presented it to us with extreme care. I may say that most of his money went for cheese, of which The Zulu was almost abnormally fond. Nothing more suddenly delightful has happened to me than happened, one day, when I was leaning from the next to the last window—the last being the property of users of the cabinet—of The Enormous Room, contemplating the muddy expanse below, and wondering how the Hollanders had ever allowed the last two windows to be opened. Margherite passed from the door of the building proper to the little washing shed. As the sentinel's back was turned I saluted her, and she looked up and smiled pleasantly. And then—a hand leapt quietly forward from the wall, just to my right; the fingers clenched gently upon one-half a newly broken cheese; the hand moved silently in my direction, cheese and all, pausing when perhaps
