cellars; he gave rein within himself, and, so far as he could, in the hearts of his subordinates, to a sort of epileptic outburst of violence and brutality.

But once again 'Herr Professor' took the wrong road. His reckoning went astray. These scenes of terror did not, as he hoped, crush the soul of France. France is very easily moved, but not frightened. You can soften her, lead her away from her duty, and conceal her true interest from her, through arousing her ready emotion by some act, some suggestion, some utopian vision of greatness of heart and love. You can allure her by nobility of conduct. Manifestly, too, you can crush her by brute force, - but you cannot reduce her to helplessness by terror. These crimes have taught us to hate, not to cringe.

Victims of the war or of crime, the devastated communes are numerous in Lorraine. What will become of them, and what has become of their people?

The people, who did not desert their villages until the last extremity, have had various experiences. Those who lived near the boundary of the department and crossed that boundary, have scattered through France - to the Centre and the South, where they have been welcomed like brothers. I have done all that I possibly could do to retain on Lorraine soil the largest possible number; here they are not so uprooted, as it were; they live in a neighborhood to which they are more accustomed; the tie that binds them to the consecrated ground where they were born and where their ancestors repose, the ground which they will make fruitful by their toil of to-morrow, is not broken; they are encompassed by a more active affection; and more, and above all, being near to their villages, they will return to them as soon as it is humanly possible to do so - that is, as soon as the military operations permit,

and also, as soon as they can find in the ruined villages a semblance of shelter.

There are still twenty thousand refugees in the department, awaiting the blessed hour of their return to their homes. The majority are in Nancy itself; several thousands of women, children, and old men are quartered in huge barracks. It was in these barracks that the glorious troops of the 20th Corps were in garrison before the war. The heroes marched away; hens and newly hatched chickens took shelter in the eagle's nest. Our barracks have been transformed into hospital cities. Take the Molitor barrack, with its twenty-five hundred guests. We have set up there twenty schools for children -boys and girls of less than thirteen years; classes in housekeeping for girls of thirteen to eighteen; trade schools for boys above thirteen; workshops for adults; a church in a shed, a hospital, shower-baths, and so forth.

Go into one of the workshops: our women are working for the army, making bags which, being filled with earth, are used in building parapets in the trenches; their wages are modest, but they know that these bags are essential for the national defense, that bags of earth are the modern bucklers, and the coarse needles fly to and fro in the silence. Look into the housekeeping class: our girls are making dresses from the material we give them; they are learning cooking, mending, domestic

one is hard at work, as if, by doing his problem without an error, or his page of writing, he hoped to save his country. Inspect staircases, dining-rooms, bedrooms-everything is scrupulously clean. Here good order, toil, and discipline reign; here, confidence in the destiny of the Fatherland can be felt in the air.

Nancy, an open city,Nancy, which since the war began has not had within its walls a single gun, a single regiment, a single depot of munitions, -Nancy, which no fortification defends, was bombarded in September. Being but a few kilometres from the frontier, it is an easy prey for the Zeppelins and Taubes, from which it receives frequent noisy visits. The day is radiantly fine, the air is fresh, a gentle breeze is blowing; Nature gives to man counsels of peace and love. Suddenly a huge sinister bird appears over the city; the guns open fire upon it; it drops a few bombs at random, and hurries away in terror as soon as a French airship appears and gives chase. It has disappeared. Calm is restored. Two or three women and children lie dead in the streets. Silently we bury our dead and every one goes back to work.

And in yonder devastated villages life will begin anew; it is already stirring in some of them. As soon as a village is freed from the German occupation, our Lorrainers rush back to it. In the few houses still standing they crowd together, to be near the fields where they used formerly to raise their fair crops, and where they must raise them again to-morrow. They plough to the roar of the cannon, sometimes amid falling shells.

The rebuilding of the ruined houses presents a serious problem. At the present moment we can think of solving it only partially. Our first care is to repair those houses that are simply wounded: here a roof is replaced, there

the holes made by shells are filled up. Alas! the burned houses are not wounded merely they are dead; the charred and tottering walls must be pulled down, the ruins cleared away, and a new house built on the cleared space. That will be the work of to-morrow. I dare not calculate the money, the material, the labor, the time that it will require! Meanwhile, we must turn our attention to the most urgent needs. We are building temporary shelters, in small houses of brick or fibro-cement, which we assign, in order of priority, to the families of farmers whose return to the commune is necessary for the exploitation of the fields; and among these families, first of all, those-and they are very frequent in Lorraine in which there are large numbers of children.

-

Poor creatures! They are happy to find a roof-tree, a home; and yet they are a little like shipwrecked sailors. They have lost everything in the upheaval. They fled from the fire, from the shells that fell like hail, or from the assassins assassins having no time to take anything with them. They went on foot, by muddy roads, pushing the children's perambulators before them. Everything in the old ancestral home was destroyed. They found there on their return naught but heaps of stone and ashes. Even where the house was only damaged, the interior was downright chaos; the shell which did not destroy all the walls, penetrated them, and when it burst shattered all the furniture.

We do our best to supply these unfortunates with the essential things, but how scanty the essentials are! Our patched-up houses, our temporary shelters, are bare. The bedding is insufficient, the kitchen outfit rudimentary, and furniture properly so-called almost non-existent. What joy would lighten the poor home if I could carry thither

a cradle for the new-born child, or a few pieces of bedding or household articles for the whole family!

But you will not hear a word suggestive of discouragement, weariness, or even impatience. The trial is long and severe; but their souls will be able to endure it, without a moment of weakening, until the end-until the day of liberation. Every one realizes what is at stake in the conflict which is shaking the whole earth, and that it is not, as in so many wars, a simple contest between two nations. The simplest minds feel that if German Imperialism should triumph, not France alone, not Europe alone, but the whole world would be made subject to the most hypocritical, the must brutal, and the most arrogant domination; and that under that new régime all that civilization has won in the domain of thought, of art, and of individual liberty; all that embellishes modern society with grace, elegance, and attractiveness; all that ennobles it in the way of kindliness, respect for conventions, sincerity, truth -all this would be endangered, debased, dishonored.

On the other hand they perceive that if German Imperialism shall be crushed, a new era will begin, and that, in the independence and harmonious diversity of the nations, great and small, delivered from the degrading nightmare of

Kultur, Kultur which, not by accident, but by a strictly logical sequence of events, falling lower and lower, descending from one moral backsliding to another, was destined to come at last to the unforgettable crime of the Lusitania, mankind will resume lightheartedly its upward progress toward the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Every one in France, and with peculiar reason in Lorraine, understands this. Never, therefore, in any land, at any time, was the determination to conquer or to die more vigorously formed. And as the struggle to lay the Monster low must necessarily be a long one, as the magnificent efforts of our troops are not enough, as the whole nation must show itself deserving of the Victory, we civilians too are doing our utmost to prove ourselves worthy of our gallant defenders. We have learned from them the value of discipline, of unwavering resistance, of good-humor in danger, of toil in silence. And, like them, we are united in a deep-rooted, sacred union: Bishop and Prefect, priests and laymen, Catholics and Protestants, workmen and masters, Conservatives and Socialists, have clasped hands; they communicate in the same love of the Fatherland and of Civilization, menaced by the barbarians; they have a single heart to suffer, a single soul to hope — a single determination to act.

ON AUTHORS

I WRITE myself; therefore I feel free to say what I please about authors; but if you, sir, or madam, who read, but do not write, were to give voice to the reflections that are even now beginning to distill from my pencil, I should doubtless resent them. And here, indeed, I am faced by the sudden reflection that much of what I say myself I might resent in the mouths of others. This leads to a whole new train of thought, which, however, I refuse to take, and board instead the one I set out for, The Authors' Unlimited. There are many things to be remarked about authors, but in so short a paper it is possible to touch upon only a very few. One of the first facts that strikes the investigator in this field is that members of my profession do not always appear to endear themselves to those with whom they have dealings. 'What do you think of authors?' I once asked an editor.

'I hate 'em!' he answered without a moment's hesitation.

Another editor assured me, with a weary sigh, that authors were 'kittle cattle.' This affords a writer a little leap of amusement. So editors suffer from authors, even as authors from editors! Well, yes, we are kittle cattle! But some of this is due, no doubt, to what people expect of us. I was presented once to a lady who immediately fixed me with an eager eye.

'I am making a study of the habits of authors,' she announced. (Here a dreadful sinking of the heart assailed me.) 'Kindly tell me at what hour you retire.'

"Usually at half-past ten,' I answered wretchedly.

At that, as I had expected, her eyebrows went up. "The author of When All Was Dark,' she informed me, 'sits up all night. She says she cannot sleep until she has savored the dawn.' However, she was kind enough to give me another chance. 'What do you eat?' she asked.

"Three hearty meals a day,' I answered.

'Not breakfast!' she pleaded. 'Why, St. George Dreamer never takes more than three drops of brandy on a lump of sugar in the morning. Just the sight of a coffee cup will upset his work for a week.'

And then she left me, sure, I have no doubt, that no real author could confess to such distressingly normal habits as mine.

Doubtless she is an eager reader of all those little paragraphs informing us how authors write. How this one has to have his black mammy rub his head for an hour before he can even think of work; and that one confesses that to write a love scene she must have the odor of decayed bananas in the room. Well, the world would be a sadder place without these little paragraphs. Would that I had something of a like nature to offer! But alas! I have no black mammy, and the smell of overripe fruit leaves my hero cold. Also, to give forth such gems of information one must be able to observe a certain rule. It is, Don't laugh or you might wake up. This rule is always sacredly in force at literary gatherings. The fact of being an author, and of being at an authors' meeting, induces, it appears, an

intense seriousness. In my younger days I did not realize this, and once at a gathering of this nature, I asked a care-free question. 'Do you think,' I inquired of the author next me, 'that it is possible for an unmusical person to write verse?'

I confess now that I put the question somewhat in the spirit of the Irishman, who, asking after his friend's health, added, 'Not that I care a damn, but it makes conversation.' Heaven defend me from ever again making so much conversation! A gleam shot up in my author's eye. 'Let us go over and ask Professor,' he cried. 'He wrote What Poets Cannot Do. He's just the man to tell us!' And before I could escape, he dragged me through the press of authors, and flung me before the professor, with the tag, 'Unmusical, but aspires to write verse, is this possible?'

I know now how the beetle feels beneath the microscope. Seeing the little group we made, two young authors 'hurried up, and more, and more, and more.' They surrounded me to listen, to inspect, to comment; they asked one another eager questions about me, they compared notes, they appealed to the author of What Poets Cannot Do, and always their dreadful eyes were fixed upon me. Never, never again will I dare the dreadful seriousness of an authors' meeting with an idle question!

I have also learned another lesson. It is how to converse with authors. I shudder now to think of my early and crude attempts in this matter. The remembrance of one particular occasion stands out with dreadful vividness. I had been introduced to a distinguished writer. She raised her eyes to mine for a wan instant, a pale flicker of recognition passed over her face, and thensilence. Readers, nay, let me call you friends while I make this terrible confession,-I broke that silence! I was

young; I did not understand. I do now. I have never been able since to read "The Ancient Mariner' - I know too well the awfulness of having shot an albatross. "The lady,' I said to my inexperienced self, 'does not care to converse; she expects you to do so.' Accordingly, I broke into light and cheerful talk, something in conversation corresponding, I fear, to what in dry goods the clerk recommends as 'a nice line of spring styles.' I realize that only a series of illustrations can make the situation clear. Imagine then, if you please, a tinkling cymbal serenading a smouldering volcano; a puppy trying to woo the Sphinx to a game of tag; sunlit waves breaking upon a 'stern and rock-bound coast,' and you may get a faint idea of the situation. I began almost immediately to experience that far-from-home sensation of which Humpty-Dumpty speaks with so much feeling. As I beheld one after another of my little remarks dash itself to nothingness against that stern and rockbound coast, only the time and the place kept me from bursting into tears. Fortunately it did not last too long. In another minute one or the other of us would have shattered into the maniac's wild laughter. And I have every reason to fear that I should have been that one. Others, however, realizing the awful thing I was doing, rushed up and separated us. Sympathetic hands were stretched to her; low words were murmured, and she was drawn into a secluded corner where her silence might be preserved from any further onslaughts of a like sacrilegious nature. But no one stretched a hand to me; no sympathetic words were murmured in my ear!

I now know that in conversations with authors there should be long pauses. This is because every remark, after being received by the ear, must be submitted to a strict brain analysis,