_Sunday, August 9th._ During the past few days I have been absolutely absorbed with the affairs of the Germans. I am at present in charge of them and report results to the Second Secretary. I enter the Embassy before nine in the morning and it is after midnight before I leave its doors. None of the staff, not even Mr. Herrick himself, departs before that hour. If some of the peacefully sleeping Sovereign American Citizens who are so free with their criticisms during the daytime could see the members of the Embassy in the early hours of the morning at the end of our sixteen-hour day, they would perhaps pity themselves less. We work always at high pressure; meals are hurriedly swallowed at odd moments and at irregular hours. Each night I walk home across Paris, down the Rue Freycinet, over the Pont de l'Alma, through the Avenue Bosquet, Avenue Duquesne, Rue Oudinot to the Rue d'Olivet--and sleep. It is a long walk when one is dead tired, but there are no public conveyances at night and, indeed, few in the daytime. The walk takes nearly an hour, even at a fast gait, for at short intervals one is halted by policemen demanding explanations of this midnight journey. Few experiences have been more weird than this nightly trip through the familiar Paris streets, strangely dark and absolutely deserted. Each day is now a haze of Germans and their troubles; of policemen, detectives, and soldiers, of tears and laughter, bits of the sublime and the ridiculous; of women who have been robbed and men who have been arrested as spies; of constant struggles to secure papers for poor hounded creatures, which one policeman demands and another refuses to grant; of beaten faces and tear-stained cheeks; of French women endlessly begging unobtainable news of sons lost in Germany, and of petty crookednesses on the part of those we are trying to help and protect. Affairs are, however, running more smoothly. We have found means to get small change in large quantities, and I now know personally most of the police officials who are concerned in German affairs. * * * * *