My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_ as I stepped on the boat. It is the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o’clock I am on my way to Wellington House. “Sir Gilbert,” speaks the attendant in resplendent livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. “Do you know where you are?” he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. “This,” he says, “is the headquarters of the English government’s press bureau for the war and I am in charge of the American publicity.” Who cares for Lord Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The man who has written “The Seats of the Mighty” sits in them. From his desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all the right doors to me. He can’t do it immediately, in war-time. One has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the Authors’ League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. “I do know my America rather well,” he says at length. “I married a girl from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul.” It is the way his voice thrills on “my America.” I am sure any American correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of 1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament. He doesn’t wear a monocle. And he says to a woman “Now, what can I do for you?” in just the tone of voice that an American man would use when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this moment: “I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him,” reflects the man who is deciding. “But—are you in ‘Who’s Who’?” Just for the lack of a line in a book, a government’s good favour might have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. “Any more credentials?” he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind—and drop a Phi Beta key in his hand. “I won’t take that up on you,” he says with a smile. And my cause is won. THE WAY IT IS DONE