No home was ever deserted, I am sure, more reluctantly or so precipitately as my little _ménage_ in Wilmersdorf. It seemed a woefully inglorious ending to thirteen very happy and fruitful years in Berlin. I thanked Heaven that my wife and little boy were not there to be evicted with me. A woman’s attachment to the things which have spelled home--the books, the pictures, the thousand and one household trinkets, enshrined with priceless value to those who have accumulated them--is far stronger than a man’s. The wrench of separation would have been correspondingly harder to bear. In the midst of such reveries, sandwiched between selecting the most essential contents for the two suit-cases to which I was limited, I had a caller. "_Herr Direktor_ Kretschmar, of the Hotel Adlon, has come to see you," announced _Fräulein_. Kretschmar is probably known to more American travelers to Europe than any other hotel man on the Continent. The Adlon had been Yankee headquarters in Berlin ever since its opening in the autumn of 1907. Old man Adlon, its genial founder and proprietor, he of the arc-light face at midnight, after a liberal evening’s libations o’er the flowing bowl, used to be fond of assuring people that "_mein lieber Freund Wile_" had "made" the Adlon. If telling people that the Adlon was the best hotel in Berlin, and reporting in my American dispatches, as necessity required, that Governor Herrick, Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Schwab, Doctor David Jayne Hill, Vice-President Fairbanks, Theodore P. Shonts, John Hays Hammond, Otto H. Kahn or some other famous fellow citizen was lodged in the marble and bronze caravansary at the head of _Unter den Linden_--if this "made" the Adlon--I plead guilty to Herr Adlon’s charge. I shall never do it again. I divined at once the object of the curly-haired Kretschmar’s visit. Having graduated, I believe, like many eminent German hotel keepers, from the humble ranks of hall-porters and head waiters, he was a past master in obsequious servility. Many a time I had seen him bow and scrape like a grinning flunky as he welcomed the arriving or sped the parting guest at the Adlon, but never was he so cringing a Kretschmar as he stood before me now. He got down to business without delay.