Is Boy-Ed Coming?

Vigilant U. S. patriots felt the deepest marrow of their bones chill with affrighted horror last week at despatches reporting that the notorious German Captain Karl Boy-Ed was seeking a visa to enter the U. S.

The patriots recalled that, as a naval attache under von Bernstorff, the German pre-War Ambassador to the U. S., Captain Boy-Ed caused such publications as the well poised Outlook to print the following denunciation of his activities: "Captain Boy-Ed and Captain von Papen . . . have been the inspiration if not the agency of the Teutonic plots and conspiracies . . . of all the hideous crimes--arson, dynamiting, murder--committed in this country in a shameless and cowardly attempt to stop our supplies from going to the Allies."

As the patriots sat down to compose letters to Secretary of State Kellogg, demanding that Boy-Ed be refused admission to the U. S., shameless journalists recalled an unwitting practical joke upon the U. S. Secret Service and upon Boy-Ed himself perpetrated by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz.

In 1915, just before Boy-Ed was recalled to Germany at the request of the State Department, the U. S. Secret Service intercepted a German cable addressed to him which read: "YOU MAY MARRY TIRPITZ." Puzzled, U. S. cryptographic experts toiled over these four words, failed to extract a meaning from what they took to be a fathomless code, at length goaded almost to distraction cautiously persisted in holding up the cable.

Meanwhile Miss Virginia Mackay-Smith, daughter of Bishop Mackay-Smith of Washington, fretted and grew petulant because the dashing and long socially popular Captain Boy-Ed insisted that he had not yet received permission from his superior, Grand Admiral Tirpitz, to marry her and take her back with him to Germany. Boy-Ed sailed without Miss Mackay-Smith, who was obliged to wait for the War to end before hastening to marry him in Germany.

Late Berlin despatches last week reported that the local U. S. Embassy had refused a visa to Boy-Ed, stated that he was not expected to appeal directly to the State Department.