gain
to complete our tour. We visited the various filling points of water
carts and gradually drew nearer the front line trenches. Turning down
one arm of "the tuning fork"--a forked road near Festubert, we came
upon an advanced dressing-station. A little to our left was a grey
pile of bricks and rubble, all that remained of the village of
Festubert.

The medical officer of the dressing-station told me that only ten
minutes before the enemy had been shelling the spot about a quarter of
a mile farther on, which was our next point of inspection.

"What do you think? Shall we go?" asked the sanitary officer.

"I leave it to you," I said, and we proceeded.

As we approached our destination I picked up the next numbered bottle.
It was number 13. A curious sensation passed over me and I put the
bottle back, taking up number 14. "Why don't you live up to your
disbelief in superstitions," I said to myself and I put bottle number
14 back. When we arrived at the place I took up number 13, got the
water sample while the car was being turned and "beat it." Of course
nothing happened and we finished our trip at 5 p.m. after a 60-mile
tour through the area occupied by as fine a Scotch division as
Scotland ever produced.

There are compensations for almost everything in life if you can
discover them: I never enjoyed a bath more in my life than the one I
had when I reached home that night, sticky and dusty and hot, with the
aid of a sponge and half a gallon of water. (Baths are rare in French
houses.)

_The Fire Fete._

Merville is a staunch compact little town with a big church whose
lofty byzantine, rounded dome projected high into the air forms a
landmark that can be seen for miles. We have been able to pick up
this tower quite easily from a point in Belgium fourteen miles away--a
point from which we were actually watching the bombardment of our
lines at St. Eloi on the 10th of June 1916. The church is a very large
one for a town of the size, but as the people are very good Catholics
in that district, it was in constant use from early morning to late at
night. Funerals passed to and from it daily and the chants of the
resonant-voiced priests became such a frequent thing that we ceased to
pay any attention to them. Funerals in France are a most terribly
depressing sort of thing, anyway.

One Sunday there was evidence of something unusual on hand. A stage
twenty feet across had been erected against the wall of the Hotel d