It was one of those spontaneous expressions of people-to-people friendship that can take even a more practiced U.S. diplomat by surprise. After inspecting the new USIS library in downtown Algiers, G. Mennen Williams, 52, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was on his way out when up dashed an enthusiastic gentleman. Soapy got the hand, but the beard got him--in a bristly, both-cheeks embrace. The Algerians were all for Williams because he observed the sunrise-to-sundown Moslem fast of Ramadan--plus the fact that their government had decided to headline the U.S. emergency aid (40,000 tons of foodstuffs monthly) that helps nourish the country. Glowed Soapy, when he recovered his tongue: "I shall tell President Kennedy of the gratitude of the Algerian people."

Some four months after her husband, George, won the Michigan governorship, his sprightly missus, Lenore Romney, 52, explained how to keep winning the marital match. "Don't serve your husband a drink in a jelly glass," she told a group of conventioning beauticians in Detroit, "or serve his meals while you've got curlers on. He's the one who cares the most about you, and you owe it to him to look your very best." Then, wiggling her new light brown wiglet, Mrs. Romney let the ladies in on another secret: "It's the first time I haven't been all me."

With all the adulation going on for Whistler's Mother in her guest appearance in Atlanta, everyone seemed to forget another notable lady in art, who was peacefully tending her needlework in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she has been a stay-at-home for five years. She was Whistler's Mother-in-Law, a postcard-sized pen-and-wash drawing of Mrs. John Birnie Philip, whom James McNeill Whistler always respectfully called "Ma'am."

Bedtime for Israel's most distinguished philosopher, Martin Buber, is 10 o'clock. But his 85th birthday was an exception. At the stroke of 11, some 400 students from the Hebrew University, where he taught before his retirement, paraded up Jerusalem's Lovers of Zion Street to the door of Buber's villa, carrying torches and singing in Hebrew "For Martin's a jolly good fellow." On the veranda, a pretty coed garlanded the white-whiskered Hasidic sage with flowers and soundly bussed his cheek. "What?" asked Buber with a merry twinkle. "Is there only one girl student here?" Then the students presented him with honorary membership in their student union. "I have a drawer full of honorary degrees, in everything from theology to medicine," said Buber. "But this is the first time I've been made an honorary student. This is a great honor for me."

Four years after the 1958 coup that ended royal rule in oil-rich Iraq, a pretty blonde girl, Genevieve Arnault, 23, told a strange story to a Manhattan court. She was, she said, the widow of assassinated King Feisal II, 23 at the time of his death. They had fallen in love at a garden party in Greenwich, Conn, given by her mother, a lady engineer and construction company executive. In 1957 Genevieve went to Baghdad, where she and Feisal were secretly married. Who believed it? A Manhattan surrogate court judge, that's who. The judge ruled that she is Feisal's lawful widow, making her eligible for $124,000 in the late King's Manhattan bank account, untold amounts more abroad if foreign courts agree.

"Love is not a stimulating emotion," proclaimed Dr. Morris Fishbein, 73, retired editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "It's a weakening one. The victim sweats, his blood vessels dilate, he takes on a pale and sickly look." For every Leander ready to swim the Hellespont, "the record is filled with stories of coronaries and strokes brought on by exertion caused by too much emotion."

A resolution to grant the first honorary U.S. citizenship* to Sir Winston Churchill, 88, bogged down in Congress recently, when worrywarts feared that the honor might later be passed out like green stamps. But the states may do the job piecemeal. Nebraska's legislature made Sir Winston a state citizen last week; Tennessee is about to do so this week. The man who once described himself as a living Anglo-American alliance already has scads of transatlantic ties, from honorary citizenship in the city of Jacksonville, Fla., to life membership in the Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Co. of Alexandria, Va. Yet Sir Winston is an honorary citizen (since 1941) of only one country--to wit, Cuba.

Ill lay: Herbert Lehman, 84, former New York Democratic Governor and Senator, with a fractured left hip, after a fall in his bedroom, in Palm Springs, Calif.; Van Cliburn, 28, rag-mopped pianist, recovering from tonsillitis, holding up a Western concert tour, in Tucson, Ariz.; Sir Anthony Eden, 65, former British Prime Minister, of a mild anginal attack, on Barbados; Marshall Bridges, 31, star (8-4) relief pitcher for the New York Yankees last year, laid up with a .25-cal. slug from a lady's pistol in his left calf, following a barroom wild pitch, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

*Not even the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought beside George Washington, got U.S. citizenship directly. Granted citizenship in the ex-colonies of Maryland and Virginia, the Marquis (and all his male descendants) automatically thereby became a citizen of the Republic in 1788 when the Constitution was ratified.

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