homa, 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, "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 c