The crowd outside the door, often several hundred in number, is kept in order by two policemen. Assistants hand out numbers like those used for the Paris auto-busses, not given however for priority, but for undesirability; the least desirable getting in first so that we may be the sooner rid of them. These assistants also see that each applicant has the correct papers in his hand, and that three of them are waiting in line to facilitate the steady flow of the human current. The receipts and my entries form a double record and check to be used in the official accounts which are balanced every day and in the end will be transmitted in reports to the German and Austrian Governments. A stenographer keeps an indexed, alphabetical list of all the applicants, which enables me to find the past record of any case which reappears. In addition to this, I have a system of hieroglyphics which I write in on the lower right-hand corner of the police papers which every foreigner must at all times carry with him for identification. There is also an interpreter for those rare comers who speak neither French nor English. By this system I have managed to examine as many as one hundred and thirty-five cases in an hour, and once as high a number as seven hundred in a single day. At the beginning of the war there were probably at least thirty thousand Germans and Austrians in or near Paris who became wards of the American Embassy when the affairs of the German and Austrian Embassies were turned over to us, all of them needing to be furnished with proper police papers and to be provided with a refuge until such time as they are shipped to detention camps in the south of France. * * * * * _Sunday, August 23d._ Here in Paris, extraordinary as it may seem, we have had no real news of the progress of the war. The Official Communiqués carry to a fine point the art of saying nothing of any importance. The newspapers are so strictly censored that they are permitted to publish little except these _communiqués_ or editorials based upon them. Letters and papers from America really give us the first accounts of events which are happening at our very gates. We know by rumor that there has been heavy fighting somewhere and somewhen. Many German prisoners are being taken around Paris southward to the detention camps which I hope soon to visit, and the flags of three German regiments have been brought to Paris and exhibited with considerable ceremony. This should indicate that battles favorable to the French have been fought, since a German regiment numbers three thousand men and would defend its flag to the last.