Elizabeth Moody, age nineteen and very beautiful, accompanied her Uncle, Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk and family on an official trip for the United States government, using their personal car and paying their own expenses, to study old Roman lands for the benefit of the US soil conservation service, and American farmers to find out what could [learned] be of the agricultural successes and failures of the past.
Tunisia January 6, 1939
Located a good hotel up in the hills with a gorgeous view of the harbor and coast, (a tropical garden, a tennis court,) to which we moved at lunchtime. In the morning I had written the hotel at Posada, about my ring which I had lost at Posada, and I am hoping for the best. The Hotel Bellevue to which we transferred, was an old Moorish palace and is beautifully furnished with old rugs and hangings. The floors over here are always tile and cold. The owners, through a series of luck, accumulated a good fortune, but they are very common people. She yells at the least thing like a charwoman. The servants get no pay except for the 10% tips, and if she finds out they’ve been tipped extra she doesn’t give them their full share of their meager 10% tips. They are as stingy and miserly as two people can be. It makes me quite indignant for the lovely people here who have to suffer such injustices, especially the one-armed man at the desk. He was a son of the vice consul in New York and speaks excellent English. However he is smart and is getting out. In the afternoon Mr. Abry and I hiked up on a hill and part just behind the hotel and watched the battleship carrying Daladier leave the harbor amid the shrill siren whistles. Wrote the rest of the day.
Nullius in Verba 