HYDE PARK, Wednesday—We had an amusing lunch yesterday. Dr. Floyd Reeves and Mr. Mark McCloskey were our only guests. We sat on the South Portico looking across the White House lawn to the Jefferson Memorial. In passing, I should like to say that I hope in time the gleaming white dome of that memorial will weather to a little softer color.

At a little before 6:00 o'clock, Prince Bernhard and Princess Juliana arrived. He is as friendly and simple as she proved to be when she came on her first visit. I met them on the front portico and took them up to the President's study, where the President was waiting for them.

We had a small dinner and movie in the evening. The President had given me strict instructions that I was not to put over anything educational on them, that it was to be an evening of entertainment! In other words, he did not want me to use the occasion to show any of the government films. Therefore, our dinner guests are none the wiser as to our farm security program, our soil conservation work, the CCC, or any of the things which they might otherwise have seen!

When our dinner guests had left, the President sat and talked to our two young royal guests on European conditions until late in the night.

It was a joyful surprise just before dinner to get word from Bolling Field that Elliott had flown in from one of our outpost camps now being built. He telephoned his wife and and made the distressing discovery that his small son had had an accident to his eye. My poor little daughter-in-law, Ruth, has had a great many burdens to carry alone since Elliott went away. If it is true that one's shoulders always adapt themselves to one's burdens, she must be growing visibly in these months.

Elliott told me something about this camp on which these Regular Army boys are working 18 hours a day to transform into an airfield. The weather has been very trying and the boys who came up from Miami are finding it very difficult to adjust to it. Even letters take a long while to get there. Elliott says it is easy to think you have been forgotten by your family and friends as well as your government.

We left by night train for New York City and then took a train at 8:00 o'clock this morning for Poughkeepsie. We had breakfast on the train and Miss Mildred McAfee, the President of Wellesley College, joined us. She will stay for lunch at my cottage, after which we start off on our drive for Campobello Island.