To Djemal and the other Turkish officials who kept pressing me I suggested that their Ambassador in Washington should directly take up the matter with the President. They acted on this advice, but the Greeks again got ahead of them. At two o’clock, June 22nd, the Greek _chargé d’affaires_ at Washington and Commander Tsouklas, of the Greek Navy, called upon the President and arranged the sale. As they left the President’s office the Turkish Ambassador entered--just fifteen minutes too late! I presume that Mr. Wilson consented to the sale because he knew that Turkey was preparing to attack Greece and believed that the _Idaho_ and _Mississippi_ would prevent such an attack and so preserve peace in the Balkans. Acting under the authorisation of Congress, the Administration sold these ships on July 8, 1914, to Fred J. Gauntlett for $12,535,276.98. Congress immediately voted the money realised from the sale to the construction of a great modern dreadnought, the _California_. Mr. Gauntlett transferred the ships to the Greek Government. Rechristened the _Kilkis_ and the _Lemnos_, these battleships immediately took their places as the most powerful vessels in the Greek Navy, and the enthusiasm of the Greeks in obtaining them was unbounded. By this time we had moved from the Embassy to our summer home on the Bosphorus. All the summer Embassies were located there, and a more beautiful spot I have never seen. Our house was a three-storey building, something in the Venetian style; behind it the cliff rose abruptly, with several terraced gardens towering one above the other. The building stood so near the shore and the waters of the Bosphorus rushed by so rapidly that when we sat outside, especially on a moonlight night, we had almost a complete illusion that we were sitting on the deck of a fast sailing-ship. In the daytime the Bosphorus, here little more than a mile wide, was alive with gaily-coloured craft. I recall this animated scene with particular vividness because I retain in my mind the contrast it presented a few months afterward, when Turkey’s entrance into the war had the immediate result of closing this strait. Day by day the huge Russian steamships, on their way from Black Sea ports to Smyrna, Alexandria, and other cities, made clear the importance of this little strip of water, and explained the bloody contests of the European nations, extending over a thousand years, for its possession. However, these early summer months were peaceful; all the Ambassadors and Ministers and their families were thrown constantly together; here daily gathered the representatives of all the Powers that for the last three years have been grappling in history’s bloodiest war, all then apparently friends, sitting around the same dining-tables, walking arm-in-arm upon the porches. The Ambassador of one Power would most graciously escort into dinner the wife of another whose country was perhaps the most antagonistic to his own. Little groups would form after