A weepy good-by scene with _Fräulein_, a parting, lingering look around my beloved _Arbeitszimmer_--so soon to be ransacked by the German police--an undying vow from the little woman to guard our Lares and Penates as if they were her own last earthly possessions, and all was at an end, so far as my habitat in Berlin was concerned. It has not been my privilege to say farewell to fireside and dear ones and then leave for the front in field-gray or khaki, but no soldier-man anywhere in this war has torn himself away from home ties more sorrowfully than I turned my back in the gathering dusk of August 5, 1914, on dear old Helmstedter-strasse. Instinctively I felt that I should never see it again, and my heart was heavy. "What’s Baron von Stumm got against you?" asked Second Secretary Harvey, smilingly, at the American Embassy, when I arrived, bag and baggage, at nine o’clock. "He says you’re not an American." Stumm was the chief of the Anglo-American section of the German Foreign Office. He knew perfectly well that I am an American. He had entertained me at his own table in May, 1910, when he gave a luncheon-party in honor of the American newspaper correspondents stationed in Berlin and those traveling with Mr. Roosevelt on the occasion of the Colonel’s visit to the Kaiser. Stumm had "nothing against me" in June, I explained to Harvey, because of his own sweet volition he distinguished me with a call at my hotel during Kiel Regatta. I could not imagine what had suddenly come over the scion of the humble Westphalian blacksmith’s house, which was one of the first of the _nouveau riche_ German industrial tribes to be ennobled. I could only think that, like the Berlin police, _Legationsrat_ Heilbron, _Herr Direktor_ Kretschmar and nearly all other Germans, Stumm had temporarily gone mad. If I was "not an American," it had taken the Imperial German Foreign Office thirteen years to make the discovery. Some day I am going to send Stumm a Christmas card. It will be embellished with a gilded birth-certificate attested by the clerk of the County of La Porte, Indiana.