He was a huge, forbidding man. His uniform, buttoned tight to the base of his big neck, was unadorned by any orders--the uniform of a fighter. His square jaw was thrust out below thick lips firmly set; his face was abnormally broad, with cheekbones high and prominent; his cropped hair bristled and his snapping eyes glinted from under a thicket caused by his heavy eyebrows that met across his forehead. He had evidently been reading the Anti-Semitic newspapers to advantage and was determined to give me a piece of his mind. The storm from heaven broke just as the verbal torrent began, and the patter of the rain on the stones of the old courtyard wove in and out like an orchestral obligato to the Wagnerian recitative of the Polish Chief-of-State. He spoke in German--a language excellently suited to his purpose--and soon the ancient rafters were ringing with his invective. He declared that he was the chosen head of 20,000,000 people and would defend their dignity. He represented the Polish Government, the ruling power of a people that had been a nation when America was unknown, and here was a committee of Americans stepping between the elected Government of Poland and the Polish electors--positively belittling the former to the latter. He dismissed as unfounded the stories about bad treatment of prisoners. He asserted that, considering Vilna’s population of 150,000, civilian casualties in the three days’ fighting for its occupation had been comparatively few. Excesses? The exaggerations of the foreign press concerning what had happened to a relatively small number of Jews had been monstrous--one would think the country drenched with blood, whereas the occurrences had been mere trifles inevitably incident to any conquest. “These little mishaps,” he said, “were all over, and now you come here to stir the whole thing up again and probably make a report that may still further hurt our credit abroad. The Polish people resent even the charge of ever having deserved distrust: how then can your activities have any other effect than to increase the racial antipathy that you say you want to end?” He was most bitter when he referred to Article 93. “Why not trust to Poland’s honour?” he shouted. “Don’t plead that the article’s concessions are few in number or negative in character! Let them be as small or as negative as you please, that article creates an authority--a power to which to appeal--outside the laws of this country! Every faction within Poland was agreed on doing justice to the Jew, and yet the Peace Conference, at the insistence of America, insults us by telling us that we _must_ do justice. That was a public insult to my country just as she was assuming her rightful place among the sovereign states of the world!” For fully ten minutes he continued his tirade. Nothing could have stopped him and I didn’t try. When he was quite out of breath, I said quietly: