the hotel, which
gave an American a homelike feeling.

In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with
high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with
snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our
air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or
the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such
surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the
crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people
were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till
well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.

With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping
and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to
market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy
not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went
about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead
walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel's speech in the Chamber of
Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of
recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all
France beside that of the order of mobilization in August, now
weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any
interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of
German influence. When you walked through the old Place
Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries
in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very
French population which made them unconscious of danger while
their flag was flying over this very French city.

No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the
French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit
incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of
the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but
no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he
should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of
war.

At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin
coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of
the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden
through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car, why explain that
seeing the Vosges front in a motor-car may be a joy ride to an
Eskim