her homes crowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildings turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mourners going about the street and man to his long home.  How would Emporia act with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever near her; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break the morale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples from the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherless children and children born out of wedlock among the things that one had to face daily?  Perhaps our young Jewish friend thought we were wearying of her.  For she rose and said, “Well, good-night, gents—­pleasant dreams!”

Pleasant dreams—­indeed!

But in the morning we arose refreshed and hurried along a misty plain, forty miles or so from the American troops.  Always in the background were great bushy trees, and lush green grass, and the thing was composed.  How the French manage to compose their landscape is too much for me.  But at any of a thousand points the scene might have been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-looking girls in nighties to dance on the grass of the middle distance!  American landscape has to be picked apart to have its picture taken; a tree selected here, a hill there, a brook yonder, and if ladies in nighties are needed, they are brought from afar!  They are not indigenous to the soil.  But one feels that in France they might come sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rouged ready for the dance!

The road that morning seemed traversing a great picture gallery, unwinding into life as from a dream within a dream!  And then, after two hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw America!  Now America was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful.  As we switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sized and blood raw—­a farmer boy—­bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with the Middle West written all over him.  He wore a service hat at a forward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story, full-rigged Missouri mule.  He didn’t salute us but called “Hi” as we passed, and then we knew that “our flag was still there” and that we were near our troops.

The boys must be popular in the neighbourhood.  For in the next village, which by the way was a town of ten thousand, our American Red Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished courtesy.  Henry wanted a match.  He could talk no French but a little boy at the inn, seeing him fumbling through his clothes with an unlighted pipe, came running to us with a little blue box of matches.  Henry gave the boy a franc—­more to be amiable than anything