The man wanted the policeman to take Jimmy in charge for destroying his property, Jimmy says. He explained to the policeman about the concertina; he said he had bought it from a woman who did not know its value, and that it was a genuine "Strad."
Jimmy says the policeman might have let the man off if it hadn't been for the porter. You see when the man's parcel was bumping along after the train, the man opened his mouth so wide that some German words fell out, and the porter had heard them. The porter knows German, Jimmy says; he learned it before the War began from a German whose luggage he had put into the wrong train.
When the German spy was searched it was found that he hadn't much money, and the policeman said he must have bought the concertina and label to try to get people to give him money and so work his way to the coast.
It turned out afterwards that he had escaped from a concentrated camp, Jimmy says. When Jimmy told the milkman about it, the milkman said that it was "Ha, ha, one more feather plucked from the horde of German rats that pollute the air with their diabolical designs."
He was just telling Jimmy that the Kaiser was standing on the brink of a deep abscess, when he heard Jimmy's bloodhound taking his horse home to put it to bed, and this disturbed his flow of thought.
The Mess Bore (innocent of small gunpowder plot). "Depend upon it, Sir, there'll be something happening quite soon now, and nearer than we think for."
A testimonial:—