sending me in a military automobile and providing an escort. I had
been over to the War Office very often and had made friends of several
of the politest men on earth.

I went out and bought the largest envelope to be found in Paris. Into
this I packed all those other big brown envelopes and drove over to
the Ministère de la Guerre. I explained my predicament. Would they
seal it with the formidable seal of the War Office and write
_Propagande_ across it? Of course if they wished I would leave my
garnerings for a systematic search. They merely laughed at this
unusual evidence on my part of humble patience and submission. The
French are the acutest people in the world. By this time these
preternaturally keen men in the War Office knew me better than I knew
myself. If I had, however unconsciously and in my deepest recesses,
harbored a treacherous impulse toward the country I so professed to
admire and to desire to serve, or if my ego had been capable of sudden
tricks and perversions, they would long since have had these
lamentable deformities, my spiritual hare-lip, ticketed and docketed
with the rest of my dossier.

As it was they complied with my request at once, gave me their
blessing, and escorted me to the head of the stair--no elevators in
this great Ministère de la Guerre and the Service de Santé is at the
top of the building. I went away quite happy, more devoted to their
cause than ever, and easy in my mind about Bordeaux--where, by the
way, my trunks were not opened.

Therefore, that remarkable experience in France is altogether still so
vivid to me that to write about it reportorially, with the personal
equation left out, would be quite as impossible as it is for me to