It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide of war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in. I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They _know_ they can't win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can do." The American further reported that after his formal business had been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his whole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitude of President Wilson. Colonel ---- listened, and when the outburst was done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--" And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want war with America, you can have it to-morrow!" Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fire, his hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of him in a typical representative moment. Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at the British Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr. Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect the impressions and information that were afterward embodied in _England's Effort_. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor, when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which had just come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement and novelty of the great spectacle around us. "_A mortal, a mortal is dead_!" I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead sons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voices came the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in their fight and suffered in their pain. One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What he would have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and genius will enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America! * * * * *