“In Heaven’s name, what’s the Ambassador going to do about it?  We have no right to molest the property of one of your attaches, but this man’s room is less than 100 yards from Westminster Abbey:  it might blow up half of London.  We can’t give the thing back to him!” They had taken it to the Duck Pond, wherever that is.  About that time the Lieutenant came back.  His pet bomb gone—­what was I going to do about it?

The fellow actually wanted to bring it to his office in the Embassy!

“Look here, Lieutenant, besides the possibility of blow-up this building and killing every mother’s son of us, consider the scandal of the American Embassy in London blown up by a German bomb.  That would go down in the school histories of the United States.  Don’t you see?” No, he didn’t see instantly—­he does so love a bomb!  I had to threaten to disown him and let him be shot before he was content to go and tell them to unload it—­he would have it, unloaded, if not loaded.

Well, I had to write half a dozen letters before the thing was done for.  He thinks me a chicken-livered old coward and I know much more about him than I knew before; and we are at peace.  The newspapers never got the story, but his friends about town still laugh at him for trying first to blow up Westminster Abbey and then his own Ambassador.  He was at my house at dinner the other night and one of the ladies asked him:  “Lieutenant, have you any darling little pet lyddite cartridges in your pocket?” Think of a young fellow who just loves bombs!  Has loaded bombs for pets!  How I misspent my youth!

February, 1915.

This is among the day’s stories:  The British took a ship that had a cargo of 100,000 busts of Von Hindenburg—­filled with copper.

Another:  When Frederick Watts was painting Lord Minto he found it hard to make the portrait please him.  When he was told that Lord Minto liked it and Lady Minto didn’t and that So-and-So praised it, he exclaimed:  “I don’t care a d—­n what anyone thinks about it—­except a fellow named Sargent.”

And the King said (about the wedding[80]):  “I have the regulation of the dress to be worn at all functions in the Chapel Royal.  I, therefore, declare that the American Ambassador may have any dress worn that he pleases!”

E.M.  House went to Paris this morning, having no peace message from this Kingdom whatever.  This kind of talk here now was spoken of by the Prime Minister the other day “as the twittering of a sparrow in a tumult that shakes the world.”

Lady P. remarked to me to-day, as many persons do, that I am very fortunate to be Ambassador here at this particular time.  Perhaps; but it isn’t easy to point out precisely wherein the good fortune consists.  This much is certain:  it is surely a hazardous occupation now.  Henry James remarked, too, that nobody could afford to miss the experience of being here—­nobody who could be here.  Perhaps true, again; but I confess to enough shock and horror to keep me from being so very sure of that.  Yet no other phenomenon is more noticeable than the wish of every sort of an American to be here.  I sometimes wonder whether the really well-balanced American does.  Most of them are of the overwrought and excitable kinds.