away his secret.

Our dilemma is quite simple. Where there is a consulate there must be a
consul, and it seems to us a dreadful thing that inside that building
there lurks a Swiss envoy who does not know that we, here, we who are
walking round the Square with our mouth full of Henry Rosa's bun, once
spent a night in Switzerland. We want him to know that; we think he
ought to know it; we think it is part of his diplomatic duty to know it.
And yet how can we burst in on him and tell him that apparently
irrelevant piece of information?

We have thought of various ways of breaking it to him, or should we say
breaking him to it?

Should we rush in and say the Swiss national debt is $----, or ----
kopecks, and then lead on to other topics such as the comparative
heights of mountain peaks, letting the consul gradually grasp the fact
that we have been in Switzerland? Or should we call him up on the
telephone and make a mysterious appointment with him, when we could
blurt it out brutally?

We are a modest and diffident man, and this little problem, which would
be so trifling to many, presents inscrutable hardships to us.

Another aspect of the matter is this. We think the consul ought to know
that we spent one night in Switzerland once; we think he ought to know
what we were doing that night; but we also think he ought to know just
why it was that we spent only one night in his beautiful country. We
don't want him to think we hurried away because we were annoyed by
anything, or because the national debt was so many rupees or piasters,
or because child labor in Switzerland is----. It is the thought that the
consul and all his staff are in total ignorance of our existence that
galls us. Here we are, walking round and round the Square, bursting with
information and enthusiasm about Swiss republicanism, and the consul
never heard of us. How can we summon up courage enough to tell him the
truth? That is the tragedy of Washington Square.

It was a dark, rainy night when we bicycled into Basel. We hid been
riding all day long, coming down from the dark clefts of the Black
Forest, and we and our knapsack were wet through. We had been bicycling
for six weeks with no more luggage than a rucksack could hold. We never
saw such rain as fell that day we slithered and sloshed on the rugged
slopes that tumble down to the Rhine at Basel. (The annual rainfall in
Switzerland is----.) When we got to the little hotel at Basel we sat in
the d