full of all kinds of
strangers. In the first days of the war there were streams of Italians,
suddenly thrown out of work in Germany and Austria and packed off home,
who passed through Switzerland in every stage of want and despair. Every
big town organized its soup kitchens at the railway station; women of
the best families took the matter in hand, and so the huddling,
apprehensive columns were passed from one town to another, fed, clothed,
and comforted, finally landing in their own country, safe and sound. An
enthusiastic letter of thanks has been published in the papers,
emanating from these grateful "Chinks," (Swiss for "Dago,") and ending
up with "Eviva la Svizzera!" ("Long live Switzerland!")

Germany began to clean out the Russians on the first day of the war.
Hordes of them poured into our country with fistfuls of ruble notes that
no one would take, and with a growing hunger that they could not
appease. A doctor was called to visit a band of twelve that were herded
together in two rooms of a cheap hotel here. He expected to find
emigrants; instead, they were people of the highest refinement. Their
story was pitiful. They had been inmates of a private sanatorium in
Germany and were summarily dismissed at the outbreak of the war.
Separated from their trunks, ill and weak, and too confused to think
clearly, they arrived in Berne with nothing but their piles of ruble
notes, that no one would take, and the fear of death in their hearts.

They were quartered in the hotel by the committee, and the physician was
called. One woman of the party begged him to take a ring, worth many
hundred dollars, and give her $10 for it, so that she might buy some
comforts for herself and daughter. Of course, the whole party was
immediately removed to a private sanatorium, where its members were
cared for, and where, little by little, they recovered their calm and
gathered up their scattered wits.

Very far from calm is a Swiss who has just returned from captivity in
the interior of Morocco on account of being mistaken for a German. The
day of the declaration of war the French authorities ordered him out of
his beautiful Moroccan home, giving him forty-eight hours to pack up.
His wife was visiting her mother here in Berne, and one can fancy her
state of mind on receiving a telegram to the effect that her husband
and babies, twins of 7 and a little fellow of a year and a half, were
ordered off, with the nurse, to parts unknown, as pol