In my life at Berlin as ambassador there was a tinge of sadness. Great changes had taken place since my student days in that city, and even since my later stay as minister. A new race of men had come upon the stage in public affairs, in the university, and in literary circles. Gone was the old Emperor William, gone also was the Emperor Frederick, and Bismarck and Moltke and a host of others who had given dignity and interest to the great assemblages at the capital. Gone, too, from the university were Lepsius, Helmholtz, Curtius, Hoffmann, Gneist, Du Bois-Reymond, and Treitschke, all of whom, in the old days, had been my guests and friends. The main exceptions seemed to be in the art world. The number of my artist friends during my stay as minister had been large, and every one of them was living when I returned as ambassador; the reason, of course, being that when men distinguish themselves in art at all, they do so at an earlier age than do high functionaries of state and professors in the universities. It was a great pleasure to find Adolf Menzel, Ludwig Knaus, Carl Beeker, Anton von Werner, and Paul Meyerheim, though grown gray in their beautiful ministry, still daily at work in their studios. Three only of my friends of the older generation in the Berlin faculty remained; and as I revise these lines the world is laying tributes upon the grave of the last of them--Theodor Mommsen. With him my relations were so peculiar that they may deserve some mention. During my earlier stays in Berlin he had always seemed especially friendly to the United States, and it was therefore with regret that on my return I found him in this respect greatly changed: he had become a severe critic of nearly everything American; his earlier expectations had evidently been disappointed; we clearly appeared to him big, braggart, noisy, false to our principles, unworthy of our opportunities. These feelings of his became even more marked as the Spanish-American War drew on. Whenever we met, and most often at a charming house which both of us frequented, he showed himself more and more bitter, so that finally our paths separated. There comes back to me vividly one evening when I sought to turn off a sharp comment of his upon some recent American news by saying: "You must give a young nation like ours more time." On this he exclaimed: "You cannot plead the baby act any longer. More time! You have HAD time; you are already three hundred years old!" Having sought in vain to impress on him the fact that the policy of our country is determined not wholly by the older elements in its civilization, but very largely by newer commonwealths which must require time to develop a policy satisfactory to sedate judges, he burst into a tirade from which I took refuge in a totally different discussion.