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also elsewhere, and in many places far more enlightened than Calcutta. From Paris we had gone on a day's visit to Versailles, the old capital of the Bourbons. We were returning in the evening, and had come to the railway station to take the train to Paris. We were waiting, three of us, for the train. Paris, which is the resort of the world, is more cosmopolitan than many European towns, but the Versailles police had probably never before seen Indians, especially in the Indian garb in which we were all dressed. Their fears and suspicions were roused at the sight of strangers attired in a strange costume and speaking a strange language. They took us to be Prussian spies! Frenchmen at the time were in a state of unusual excitement. The Franco-Prussian War had ended disastrously only a year before. Paris had just passed through the revolt of the Communists, many of whom were then on their trial. As we were walking up and down the platform, a French policeman approached us and asked us to follow him to the police-station. We protested, but we thought that discretion was the better part of valour, and we followed him to where he led us. We were taken to a room where a police officer was asleep. He got up, rubbed his eyes, looked at us (I think he was not quite sober) and asked us to produce our passports. We did so, but the man was not satisfied. How was he to know that we were the identical persons named in the passports? I produced a letter addressed to me, which I had in my pocket, and it tallied with my name in the passport. But even then his suspicions were not removed. He had a talk in French, which we did not understand, with the man who had arrested us, and he was evidently satisfied that we were after all Prussian spies.

The trouble was largely due to misunderstanding, as it is all the world over. We did not understand French and the policemen did not know English. My friends had taken some lessons in French, and they essayed to speak a few words in that language. The effort only served to deepen the suspicion of the police commissaire. He thought we were shamming, and that we knew a great deal more of the language than we pretended.

The discussion lasted nearly half an hour and at the end of it we were ordered to walk across the road to what apparently was the police lock-up. A door which opened into a room was unlocked and we were ushered inside. There was a drunken man confined in the room. He was taken elsewhere and accommodation was made for us. The policeman left us, having locked the door.