, and
people with barely enough funds, and people with no funds at all. There
were college boys who had worked their way over and couldn't find a
chance to work it back. There were art-students and music-students
whose resources had given out.

There was a very rich woman, plastered with diamonds, who demanded the
free use of my garage for the storage of her automobile. When I
explained that, to my profound regret, it was impossible, because three
American guest cars were already stored there and the place could hold
no more, she flounced out of the room in high dudgeon.

There was a lady of a different type who came to say, very modestly,
that she had a balance in a bank at The Hague which she wanted to leave
to my order for use in helping people who were poor and deserving.
"Please make as sure as you can of the poverty," said she, "but take a
chance, now and then, on the deserts. We can't confine our kindness to
saints." This gift amounted to two or three thousand dollars, and was
the foundation of the Minister's private benevolence fund, which proved
so useful in later days and of which a remnant has been left for my
successor.

An American wrote to us from a little village in a remote province of
the Netherlands saying that his remittances from home had not arrived
and that he was penniless. He added by way of personal description: "My
social position is that of a Catholic priest with nervous prostration."
We helped him and he proved to be all right.

A rising comic-opera star, of engaging appearance and manners
(American), who was under a temporary financial obscuration because her
company in Holland had broken up, came to ask us to assist her in
getting to Germany, where she had friends and hoped to find work. We did
it with alacrity. Then she wrote asking us to forward certain legal
papers in connection with a divorce which she contemplated. We did it.
Then she sent us some of her newspaper articles and a lot of clippings
from German journals, requesting us to transmit them in the Legation
pouch to America. This we politely declined, with the plea of "non
possumus". Whereupon she was furious and denounced us to the German
authorities and the German-American press.

An American lady whose husband was dying in Hamburg came in desperate
distress with her daughter, to beg us to aid them in getting to him. We
found the only way that was open, a little-known route through the
northeast corner of Holland, procure