not be read by anybody at all. You begin to feel that they may not
be deciphered or even opened. Then comes the feeling (for a
moment), why send any more? Why do anything but answer such
questions as come now and then? Corresponding with Nobody--can you
imagine how that feels?--What the devil do you suppose does become
of the letters and telegrams that I send, from which and about
which I never hear a word? As a mere matter of curiosity I should
like to know who receives them and what he does with them!

I've a great mind some day to send a despatch saying that an
earthquake has swallowed up the Thames, that a suffragette has
kissed the King, and that the statue of Cromwell has made an
assault on the House of Lords--just to see if anybody deciphers it.

Alter the Civil War an old fellow in Virginia was tired of the
world. He'd have no more to do with it. He cut a slit in a box in
his house and nailed up the box. Whenever a letter came for him,
he'd read the postmark and say "Baltimore--Baltimore--there isn't
anybody in Baltimore that I care to hear from." Then he'd drop the
letter unopened through the slit into the box. "Philadelphia? I
have no friend in Philadelphia"--into the box, unopened. When he
died, the big box was nearly full of unopened letters. When I get
to Washington again, I'm going to look for a big box that must now
be nearly full of my unopened letters and telegrams.

W.H.P.

The real reason why the Ambassador wished to remain in London was to
assist in undoing a great wrong which the United States had done itself
and the world. Page was attempting to perform his part in introducing
new standards into diplomacy. His discussions of Mexico had taken the
form of that "idealism" which he was apparently having some difficulty
in persuading British statesmen and the British public to accept. He was
doing his best to help bring about that day when, in Gladstone's famous
words, "the idea of public right would be the governing idea" of
international relations. But while the American Ambassador was preaching
this new conception, the position of his own country on one important
matter was a constant impediment to his efforts. Page was continually
confronted by the fact that the United States, high-minded as its
foreign policy might pretend to be, was far from "idealistic" in the
observance of the trea