rdance with my own, were so
succinctly expressed by a gentleman who shared the compartment into
which I was huddled with some eight or nine others that I cannot forbear
from repeating them here.

This gentleman, a Mr. John K. Botts, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and
evidently a person of much wealth and no small importance in his home
city, said things had come to a pretty pass when a freeborn American
citizen who had been coming to Europe every summer for years, always
spending his money like water and never asking the price of anything in
advance, but just planking down whatever the grafters wanted for it,
should have his motor car confiscated and his trunks held up on him and
his plans all disarranged, just because a lot of these foreigners
thought they wanted to fight one another over something. He said that he
had actually been threatened with arrest by a measly army captain whom
he, Mr. Botts, could buy and sell a hundred times over without ever
feeling it. He was strongly in favour of wiring our Government to order
the warring nations to suspend hostilities until all the Americans in
Europe could get back home, and mentioned thirty days as a suitable time
for this purpose.

With regard to this last suggestion I heartily concurred; and my second
cablegram to Mr. Bryan, filed while en route, embodied the thought, for
which I now wish to give Mr. John K. Botts due credit as its creator. To
insure prompt delivery into Mr. Bryan's hands, I sent the message in
duplicate, one copy being addressed to him at the State Department, in
Washington, and the other in care of the Silvery Bells Lecture and
Chautauqua Bureau, in the event that he might be on the platform rather
than at his desk.

I should have asked Mr. Botts to sign the cablegrams with me jointly
but for the fact that after the first two hours of travel he was no
longer with us. He left the train at a way station a few miles from
Paris, with a view, as he announced, to chartering a special train from
the military forces to convey him, regardless of expense, to his
destination, and failed to return. Days elapsed before I learned through
roundabout sources that he had been detained in quasi custody because of
a groundless suspicion on the part of the native authorities that he was
mildly demented, though how such a theory could have been harboured by
any one is, I admit, entirely beyond my comprehension.

Nightfall loomed imminent when we reached the town of Abb