I may mention, in passing, one little matter which throws light upon a certain disgraceful system to which I have had occasion to refer at various other times in these memoirs; and I do so now in the hope of keeping people thinking upon one of the most wretched abuses in the United States. I have said above that we were, of course, obliged to maintain the strictest secrecy. To have allowed our conclusions to get out would have thwarted the whole purpose of the investigation; but a person who claimed to represent one of the leading presses in Washington seemed to think that consideration of no special importance, and came to our rooms, virtually insisting on receiving information. Having been told that it could not be given him, he took his revenge by inserting a sensational paragraph in the papers regarding the extravagance of the commission. He informed the world that we were expending large sums of public money in costly furniture, in rich carpets, and especially in splendid silverware. The fact was that the rooms were furnished very simply, with plain office furniture, with cheap carpets, and with a safe for locking up the more precious documents intrusted to us and such papers as it was important to keep secret. The "silverware" consisted of two very plain plated jugs for ice-water; and I may add that after our adjournment the furniture was so wisely sold that very nearly the whole expenditure for it was returned into the treasury. These details would be utterly trivial were it not that, with others which I have given in other places, they indicate that prostitution of the press to sensation-mongering which the American people should realize and reprove. While I have not gone into minor details of our work, I have thought that thus much might be interesting. Of course, had these reminiscences been written earlier, this sketch of the interior history of the commission would have been omitted; but now, the award of the Paris tribunal having been made, there is no reason why secrecy should be longer maintained. Never, before that award, did any of us, I am sure, indicate to any person what our view as to the line between the possessions of Venezuela and Great Britain was; but now we may do so, and I feel that all concerned may be congratulated on the fact that two tribunals, each seeking to do justice, united on the same line, and that line virtually the same which one of the most just of British statesmen had approved many years before.