lanation. I told him
that I feared he was too experienced for the place.

The second who applied was an unquestionable Dutchman, young, good-
looking, intelligent. Papers in perfect order. Present service with a
well-known pro-German family. Previous service of one year with a lady
who was one of my best friends--the wife of a high government official.
I rang her up on the telephone and asked if she could tell me anything
about A. B., who had been in service with her for a year. A second of
silence, then the answer: "Yes, a good deal, but not on the telephone,
please. Come around to tea this afternoon." Madame L. then told me that
while the young man was clean, sober, and industrious, he had been found
rummaging among her husband's official papers, in a room which he was
forbidden to enter, and had been caught several times listening at the
keyhole of doors while private conferences were going on.

It seemed to me that a young man with such an uncontrollable thirst for
knowledge would not be suited for the very simple service which would be
required of him in our household.

Afterward, traces of both of these men were found which led unmistakably
to the lair of the chief spider of the German secret service at The
Hague. The incident was a very small one. But, after all, life is made
up of small incidents with a connected meaning.

At the time when I am writing this (September 24, 1917) the moral
character of the tools of the Potsdam gang has again been stripped naked
by the disclosure of the treachery by which the German Legation in
Argentina has utilized the Swedish Legation in that country to transmit,
under diplomatic privilege, messages inciting to murder on the high
seas. Argentina has already taken the action to be expected from an
American Republic by dismissing the German Minister. What Sweden will do
to vindicate her honor remains to be seen. Her attitude may affect our
opinion of her as a victim or a vassal of Potsdam.

There are two points in the disclosures made on September 23 by the
Department of State which bear directly upon this simple narrative of
experiences at The Hague.

The fetching female comic-opera star, Ray Beveridge, discreetly alluded
to in the third chapter (p. 71), was secretly paid three thousand
dollars by the Imperial German Embassy in Washington to finance her
artistic activities. So, you see, I was not far wrong in forwarding her
divorce papers to Germany and refusing to trans