days, had received valuable
pieces of parchment with the presidential signature attached. The
conversation had already run through the question of Votes for
Women, progressive politics, and prize-fights, and before the card
game began it had settled on the last-named, chiefly because of my
own vainglorious description of adventures at Reno, Nevada, at the
time of the Jeffries-Johnson battle for the heavyweight championship
of the world. I remember telling with some gusto of my first
newspaper interview--one with "Bob" Fitzsimmons, then the Old
Man of the ring, and "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, who was Jeffries'
trainer at Reno.

"I had always wanted to see that performance," said Luther, "and
would have gone in a flash if I could have got any one to make the
trip with me. But remember this fact: whenever the next big fight is
held I'm going with you." Later in the evening we shook hands on the
proposition.

At the time that Luther's telegram came I was planning to start for the
Continent as Staff Correspondent of the "New York Evening Post"
and Special Correspondent of the "Boston Journal." Remembering
that Cambridge agreement I immediately wired:--

"Yes. This fight will do."

So that is how it came to pass that Luther and myself boarded the
Campania together, landed in Liverpool, cast about for ways and
means of getting into the scrimmage, and for the first month and a
half of my four months of wandering on the Continent were brother
conspirators, until the duties of partnership called my friend home and
left me without a companion in adventure.

In London we absorbed to some extent a heavy British fog and to a
greater extent British public opinion. We marveled at the exterior calm
of a nation plunged in the greatest of wars, yet fighting, so it seemed
at the time, with its top hat on and its smile still undisturbed. Across
the English Channel three days later the Dutch steam packet
Princess Juliana carried us safely through mine fields and between
lanes of British torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers. We
landed on the Continent at Flushing. Thence we headed for The
Hague, Holland, the neutral gateway of northern Europe, where we
found the American Minister, Dr. Henry van Dyke, and his first
secretary, Marshall Langhorne, shouldering the work of the American
Legation in its chameleonesque capacity as bank, post-office,
detective bureau, bureau of information, charity organization, and one
might even sa