The next morning we reached Richmond and here, I should explain, I said good-bye to the rescued lieutenant, an attractive young fellow, Randolph Ryerson, whose home was in Richmond, and whose sister, Miss Mary Ryerson, a strikingly beautiful girl, had met us at Charleston the night before in response to a telegram that her brother was coming and was ill. She nursed him through the night in an uncomfortable stateroom and came to me in the morning greatly disturbed about his condition. The young man had a high fever, she said, and had raved for hours calling out a name, a rather peculiar name--Widding--Widding--Lemuel A. Widding--over and over again in his delirium. I tried to reassure her and said laughingly that, as long as it was not a woman’s name he was raving about, there was no ground for anxiety. She gave me her address in Richmond and thanked me very sweetly for what I had done. I must admit that for days I was haunted by that girl’s face and by the glorious beauty of her eyes. When we reached Washington we found that city in a panic over news of another American defeat. Philadelphia had fallen and all communications were cut off. Furthermore, a third force of Germans had landed in Chesapeake Bay, which meant that the national capital was threatened by two German armies. We now understood von Hindenburg’s deliberation. In this emergency, Marshall Reid, brother-in-law of Lieutenant Dustin, the crack aviator of the navy, who had been aboard the _Pennsylvania_, volunteered to carry messages from the President to Philadelphia and to bring back news. Reid himself was one of the best amateur flying men in the country and he did me the honour to choose me as his companion. We started late in the afternoon of August 17 in Mr. Reid’s swift Burgess machine and made the distance in two hours. I shall never forget our feelings as we circled over the City of Brotherly Love and looked down upon wrecks of railroad bridges that lay across the Schuylkill. Shots were fired at us from the aerodrome of the League Island Navy Yard; so we flew on, searching for a safer landing place. We tried to make the roof landing on the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, but the wind was too high and we finally chanced it among the maples of Rittenhouse Square, after narrowly missing the sharp steeple of St. Mark’s Church. Here, with a few bruises, we came to earth just in front of the Rittenhouse Club and were assisted by Dr. J. William White, who rushed out and did what he could to help us.