But Petherick, with all his virtues, is merely an Englishman, and it is not usual for an Englishman to hold a $3,000 office under appointment from the United States Government.  The office of despatch agent, therefore, has been nominally held by an American citizen in London.  This American citizen for a good many years has been Mr. Crane, a barrister, who simply turns over the salary to Petherick; and all the world, except the Secretary of State, knows that Petherick is Petherick and there is none other but him.

Now comes the story:  Mr. Bryan, looking around the world for offices for his henchmen, finds that one Crane has been despatch agent in London for many years, and he writes me a personal and confidential letter, asking if this be not a good office for some Democrat!

I tell the story to the Naval Attache!  He becomes riotous.  He’ll have to employ half a dozen clerks to do for the Navy ill what Petherick does well with ease, if he’s removed.  Life would not be worth living anyhow.  I uncover Petherick to the Secretary and show him in his glory.  It must be said to the Secretary’s credit that he has said nothing more about it.  Petherick, let us hope, will live forever.  The Secretary’s petty-spoils mind now works on grand plans for Peace, holy Peace, having unsuccessfully attacked poor Petherick.  And Petherick knows nothing about it and never dreams of an enemy in all the world, and in all naval and diplomatic life he has only fast friends.  If Mr. Bryan had removed him, he might have made a temporary friend of one Democrat from Oklahoma, and lasting enemies of all that Democrat’s rivals and of the whole naval and diplomatic service.

November, 1914.

We have to get away from it—­or try to—­a minute at a time; and the comic gods sometimes help us.  Squier[79] has a junior officer here to hold his desk down when he’s gone.  He’s a West Point Lieutenant with a German name.  His study is ordnance.  A new kind of bomb gives him the same sort of joy that a new species would have given Darwin.  He was over in France—­where the armies had passed to and from Paris—­and one day he found an unexploded German bomb of a new sort.  The thing weighed half a ton or thereabouts, and it was loaded.  Somehow he got it to London—­I never did hear how.  He wrapped it in blankets and put it under his bed.  He went out of town to study some other infernal contraption and the police found this thing under his bed.  The War Office took it and began to look for him—­to shoot him, the bomb-harbouring German!  They soon discovered, of course, that he was one of our men and an officer in the United States Army.  Then I heard of it for the first time.  Here came a profuse letter of apology from the Government; they had not known the owner was one of my attaches.  Pardon, pardon—­a thousand apologies.  But while this letter was being delivered to me one of the under-secretaries of the Government was asking one of our secretaries,