foolish.  On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and then a long train of motor-ambulances.  Almost any morning, at nine, I can see the long line of camions carrying the revitaillement towards the front, and the other afternoon, as I was driving up the hill, I met a train of ambulances coming down.  The big grey things slid, one after another, around the curve of the Demi-Lune, and simply flew by me, raising such a cloud of dust that after I had counted thirty, I found I could not see them, and the continual tooting of the horns began to make Ninette nervous—­she had never seen anything like that before—­ so, for fear she might do some trick she never had done in her life, like shying, and also for fear that the drivers, who were rushing by exactly in the middle of the road, might not see me in the dust, or a car might skid, I slid out, and led my equipage the rest of the way.  I do assure you these are actually all the war signs we see, though, of course, we still hear the cannon.

But, though we don’t see it, we feel it in many ways.  My neighbors feel it more than I do!  For one example—­the fruit crop this year has been an absolute loss.  Luckily the cassis got away before the war was declared, but we hear it was a loss to the buyers, and it was held in the Channel ports, necessarily, and was spoiled.  But apples and pears had no market.  In ordinary years purchasers come to buy the trees, and send their own pickers and packers, and what was not sold in that way went to the big Saturday market at Meaux.  This year there is no market at Meaux.  The town is still partly empty, and the railroad cannot carry produce now.  This is a tragic loss to the small cultivator, though, as yet, he is not suffering, and he usually puts all such winnings into his stocking.

We still have no coal to speak of.  I am burning wood in the salon—­ and green wood at that.  The big blaze—­when I can get it—­suits my house better than the salamandre did.  But I cannot get a temperature above 42 Fahrenheit.  I am used to sixty, and I remember you used to find that too low in Paris.  I blister my face, and freeze my back, just as we used to in the old days of glorious October at the farm in New Sharon, where my mother was born, and where I spent my summers and part of the autumn in my school-days.

You might think it would be easy to get wood.  It is not.  The army takes a lot of it, and those who, in ordinary winters, have wood to sell, have to keep it for themselves this year.  Pere has cut down all the old trees he could find—­old prune trees, old apple trees, old chestnut trees—­and it is not the best of firewood.  I hated to see even that done, but he claimed that he wanted to clear a couple of pieces of land, and I try to believe him.  Did you ever burn green wood?  If you have, enough said!