The station employes and the police on duty at the station formed a silent cordon, through which the departing Ambassador passed with downcast eyes. Not a word was spoken as the baron stood for a few minutes on the platform. Then the stationmaster said quietly: "_En voiture_," there was a shrill whistle, and the train, composed of five coaches and three goods trucks, glided slowly out of the station. _Tuesday, August 4._ We are now in the third day of mobilization. Weather slightly cooler, 17 degrees centigrade, with moderate southwest wind. At seven this morning I went with Sophie to the registration office for Germans, Alsatians, and Austro-Hungarians, Number 213 Place Boulevard Periere. A crowd of some five hundred persons--men, women, and children--were waiting at the doors of the public schoolroom now used as the _Siege du District_ for the seventeenth arrondissement. Although a German by birth, Sophie is French at heart. She came to Paris when only eight years old and has remained here ever since--she is now sixty-one--and has been thirty-two years with me as housekeeper and cook. All her German relatives are dead. Hers is a hard case, for if expelled from France, she would have to become practically a stranger in a strange land. Fortunately she has all her papers in order, and can show that she has nine nephews actually in the French army. I made a statement in writing for her to this effect, which she took to the registration office, but she had to wait, standing without shelter from eight in the morning to six o'clock at night. After carefully scrutinizing her papers, the officials told her that her papers must go for inspection to the Prefecture of Police, and that she must come back for them to-morrow. She had with her photographs of three of her nephews in military uniforms. One of these nephews had received a decoration during the Morocco campaign for saving his captain's life during an engagement.