were that German submarines blew up the other day.  Not a German in the Kingdom can earn a penny.  We’re giving thousands of them money at the German Embassy to keep them alive.  Our Austrian Embassy runs a soup kitchen where it feeds a lot of Austrians.  Your mother went around there the other day and they showed that they thought they owe their daily bread to her.  One day she went to one of the big houses where the English receive and distribute the thousands of Belgians who come here, poor creatures, to be taken care of.  One old woman asked your mother in French if she were a princess.  The lady that was with your mother answered, “Une Grande Dame.”  That seemed to do as well.

This government doesn’t now let anybody carry any food away.  But to-day they consented on condition I’d receive the food (for the Belgians) and consign it to Whitlock.  This is their way of keeping it out of German hands—­have the Stars and Stripes, so to speak, to cover every bag of flour and of salt.  That’s only one of 1,000 queer activities that I engage in.  I have a German princess’s[75] jewels in our safe—­$100,000 worth of them in my keeping; I have an old English nobleman’s check for $40,000 to be sent to men who have been building a house for his daughter in Dresden—­to be sent as soon as the German Government agrees not to arrest the lady for debt.  I have sent Miss Latimer[76] over to France to bring an Austrian baby eight months old whose mother will take it to the United States and bring it up an American citizen!  The mother can’t go and get it for fear the French might detain her; I’ve got the English Government’s permission for the family to go to the United States.  Harold[77] is in Belgium, trying to get a group of English ladies home who went there to nurse wounded English and Belgians and whom the Germans threaten to kidnap and transport to German hospitals—­every day a dozen new kinds of jobs.

London is weird and muffled and dark and, in the West End, deserted.  Half the lamps are not lighted, and the upper half of the globes of the street lights are painted black—­so the Zeppelin raiders may not see them.  You’ve no idea what a strange feeling it gives one.  The papers have next to no news.  The 23rd day of the great battle is reported very much in the same words as the 3rd day was.  Yet nobody talks of much else.  The censor erases most of the matter the correspondents write.  We’re in a sort of dumb as well as dark world.  And yet, of course, we know much more here than they know in any other European capital.

     To the President

     [Undated.]

     Dear Mr. President: