Notes

Acting Foreign Minister Stresemann found his name coupled with endless denials last week:

"Herr Stresemann denied that he ever denounced the late President Wilson for the latter's failure to carry through his Fourteen Points!"

"Dr. [Norman H.] Davis, President of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, denied that it ever offered Herr Stresemann a prize for his services to the cause of World Peace at Locarno."

"Herr Stresemann denied that he refused the prize because he would have had to come to Manhattan to receive it."

"Dr. Davis denied that the reason no prize was offered to Herr Stresemann was his alleged aspersion of President Wilson."

None the less the press busied itself with the affirmatives of all these denials for many days. Finally it was denied all round that Sir Austen Chamberlain and Aristide Briand have also been offered Wilson Foundation Peace Prizes but have refused them.

One night last week the Hamburg-Berlin Express de luxe thundered out over its carefully ballasted roadbed at 100 kilometers an hour. A Berliner, who endeavored to appear nonchalant, picked up the telephone instrument which dangled from a hook in his Schlafwagen (sleeping car) compartment, and bellowed the phone number of his apartment on Unter den Linden through the roar of the train. His wife answered, intelligibly, if necessarily at the top of her lungs; and the details of next morning's breakfast were gutturally decided upon. The Berliner hung up, paid the Eisenbahn Gesellschaft (railroad company) 5 gold marks ($1.20), and considered himself lucky to have been one of the first individuals to talk over the new commercial train-to-station, intertrain and station-to-train German telephone.

Despatches asserted that a switchboard-operator serves all the de luxe sleeping compartments. She establishes the actual connection with other trains or with stations through a "wired-wireless" telephone instrument of allegedly new and secret construction. Telephone engineers noted that "train wireless" has been possible as a stunt for a decade or more. They learned with interest that the new German invention is said to have leaped into "paying popularity."

At Russdorff, the local Burgomaster made an avowed bid for election popularity by blazoning abroad that he had caused the town's open air swimming pool to be filled with water which would shortly freeze, to the delight of skater-voters.

The water froze. The skaters assembled. The Burgomaster "rang the town bell" and turned a valve emptying the pool "so that no one can possibly be drowned." The ice, of course, sagged and buckled into fragments as the supporting water flowed out. Disappointed skater-voters were reported in late despatches to be warming to their work of devising a suitable epithet with which to blast their once popular Burgomaster.