Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/22

10 right, but as the passports are examined en bloc in a separate room from that in which the travellers are collected, they do not attempt to find out if the description corresponds with the person. As nothing is easier than to procure a passport in Germany, Austria, England or France, and then remain at home and let a friend travel with it, the result is wholly out of proportion to the trouble and annoyance—to say nothing of the fact that hundreds who have no passports are daily guided over the frontier on foot by men who are pointed out to every one who needs them.

I had abundant opportunity of thinking over this subject, as during the tiresome delay I walked up and down among the tea- and grog-drinking idlers in the dirty waiting-room at Granica, annoyed by intruders anxious to change my Austrian money into rubles, consoled by others who explained to me that the officials were quite within their rights in their treatment of me; that the fact of my books being in Danish was no security; who could vouch for it, that they did not contain accounts of the socialist congress in Copenhagen!

At last I got back what was left in my trunk for my own disposal, and without anything contraband except what I had in my head, I arrived the next morning in Warsaw.