I was most interested in hearing, at first hand, about Madero. Mr. McLaren, a clever lawyer with a long experience of Mexico, says he is inspired, illuminated, selfless, with but one idea, the regeneration of Mexico. He seems to have no doubt of Madero's being able to work out the Mexican situation along high, broad lines, and thinks he will surely be here, in the city, through force or the abdication of Diaz, within a month or two. Mr. Wilson, on the contrary, told me again he saw with dread the overthrow of the Diaz régime. Though the President is eighty-three, with many of the infirmities and obstinacies of old age, he also preserves many of the qualities that made him great, and Mr. Wilson said that he personally, in all his dealings with him, never found him lacking in understanding or energy. I reminded myself of La Fontaine's fable, _Entre deux Âges_, with the difference, however, that instead of having no hair left, I had no opinions left, when we rose from dinner. We drove home in an open motor under a thickly starred and gorgeous heaven; but the unfamiliar constellations gave me sudden nostalgia. _Later._ Last night the Ward Line _Merida_ sank. The wife and daughter of Mr. Seeger were on her. After five hours of anguish and uncertainty, in complete darkness, bereft of every personal belonging, the passengers were transferred to the United Fruit Company steamer that ran into them. The news has just come in. It makes 42 Calle Humboldt seem very safe. To think that as we were returning to its security from the pleasant dinner at the Embassy the disaster was taking place! [Illustration: FRANCISCO I. MADERO (From a photograph taken in 1911)] I look about this comfortable home and think how sheltered a spot had been forsaken but a short week ago, of the treasures chosen from walls and cabinets to be out of possible revolutionary harm, and now all is lying at the bottom of the sea, off Cape Hatteras, and we, strangers, are safe in the shelter of this home. "Who shall escape his fate?" I keep saying to myself. _May 13th._ On the 10th Juarez was captured with its commanding officer, General Navarro, by Orozco and Giuseppe Garibaldi, who is down here following out the family traditions. I am writing in the comfortable little library, doors opening everywhere on to the flower-planted corridor. I have been reading Creelman's _Life of Diaz_, and three volumes of Prescott are waiting on my little table. Suddenly I find I am hungry with a great hunger for the printed page and the old objective and impersonal habits of thought. In Vienna the personal, with its "grand seigneur" contour, seemed to replace quite sufficiently for the time any objective views of life. A woman who reads there is likely to be _mal vue_, which for some reason does not at all do away with the insistent seductions of Viennese life.