en me as we stood in a long
queue outside the American embassy waiting for the passports
that would make our personages sacrosanct when the German
raiders took the city. A perspiring line, we shuffled slowly forward,
thanking God that we were not as the Europeans, but had had the
good sense to be born Americans. While in the next breath we
tiraded against the self-same Government for not hurrying the
American fleet to the rescue.

The alien-looking gentleman behind me mopped his brow and
muttered something about wishing that he had not thirsted for
other "joys than those of old St. Louis."

"Pennsylvania has her good points, too," I responded.

That random shot opened wide to me the gates of Romance and
High Adventure. It broke the long silence of the girl just ahead.

"It's comforting just to hear the name of one's own home state,"
she said. "I lived in a little village in the western part of
Pennsylvania," and, incidentally, she named the village where my
father had once been minister of the church. I explained as much
to her and marveled at the coincidence.

"More marvel still," she said, "for we come not only from the same
state and the same village, but from the same house. My father
was minister in that same church."

Nickleville is the prosaic name of that little hamlet in western
Pennsylvania. Any gentle reader with a cynic strain there may
verify this chronicle and find fresh confirmation for the ancient
adage that "Fact is stranger far than Fiction."

That selfsame evening we held reunion in a cafe off the Boulevard
Clichy. There I first discerned the slightness of her frame and
marveled at the spirit that filled it. She was exuberant in the joy of
meeting a countryman and, with the device of laughter, she kept in
check the sadness which never quite came welling up in tears.

She was typical American but let her bear here the name by which
her new friends in France called her--Marie. One might linger upon
her large eyes and golden hair, but this is not the epic of a fair face
but of a fair soul--vigorous and determined, too. To the power
therein even the stolid waiter paid his homage.

"Pardon," he interjected once, "we must close now. The orders are
for all lights out by nine. It is the government. They fear the
Zeppelins."

"But that's just what I'm afraid of, too," Marie answered. "How can
you turn us out into that darkness filled with Zeppelins?" He
succumbed to this radiant banter and, cover