A few days later, when Pallavicini called upon me, he spoke of the nationalistic societies that Serbia had permitted to exist and of her determination to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina. He said that his Government would insist on the abandonment of these societies and these pretensions, and that probably a punitive expedition into Serbia would be necessary to prevent such outrages as the murder of the Grand Duke. Herein I had my first intimation of the famous ultimatum of July 22nd. The entire diplomatic corps attended the requiem mass for the Grand Duke and Duchess, celebrated at the Church of Sainte Marie on July 4. The church is located in the Grande Rue de Pera, not far from the Austrian Embassy; to reach it we had to descend a flight of forty stone steps. At the top of these stairs representatives of the Austrian Embassy, dressed in full uniform, with crêpe on the left arm, met us, and escorted us to our seats. All the Ambassadors sat in the front pew; I recall this with strange emotions now, for it was the last time that we ever sat together. The service was dignified and beautiful; I remember it with especial vividness because of the contrasting scene that immediately followed. When the stately, gorgeously-robed priests had finished, we all shook hands with the Austrian Ambassador, returned to our automobiles, and started on our eight-mile ride along the Bosphorus to the American Embassy. For this day was not only the day when we paid our tribute to the murdered heir of this medieval autocracy; it was also the Fourth of July. The very setting of the two scenes symbolised these two national ideals. I always think of this ambassadorial group going down those stone steps to the church to pay their respect to the Grand Duke, and then going up to the gaily-decorated American Embassy to pay their respect to the Declaration of Independence. All the station ships of the foreign countries lay out in the stream, decorated and dressed in honour of our national holiday; and the Ambassadors and Ministers called in full regalia. From the upper gardens we could see the place where Darius crossed from Asia with his Persian hosts 2,500 years before--one of those ancient autocrats the line of which is not yet entirely extinct. There also we could see magnificent Robert College, an institution that represented America’s conception of the way to “penetrate” the Turkish Empire. At night our gardens were illuminated with Chinese lanterns and good old American fireworks, lighting up the surrounding hills and the Bosphorus, and the American flag flying at the front of the house seemed almost to act as a challenge to the plentiful reminders of autocracy and oppression which we had had in the early part of the day. Not more than a mile across the water the dark and gloomy hills of Asia, for ages the birthplace of military despotisms, caught a faint, and, I think, a prophetic, glow from these illuminations.