e is where my books are--they are here. Thanks all the same.

It is a week since I wrote you--and what a week. We have had a sort of
intermittent communication with the outside world since the 6th, when,
after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and an occasional
newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a bicycle.

After we were certain, on the 4th of August, that war was being declared
all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to back France and
Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all. Day after day Amelie would
run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic bulletin--half a
dozen lines of facts--that was all we knew from day to day. It is all
we know now.

Day after day I sat in my garden watching the aeroplanes flying over my
head, and wishing so hard that I knew what they knew. Often I would see
five in the day, and one day ten. Day after day I watched the men of
the commune on their way to join their classe. There was hardly an hour
of the day that I did not nod over the hedge to groups of stern, silent
men, accompanied by their women, and leading the children by the hand,
taking the short cut to the station which leads over the hill, right by
my gate, to Couilly. It has been so thrilling that I find myself
forgetting that it is tragic. It is so different from anything I ever
saw before. Here is a nation--which two weeks ago was torn by political
dissension--suddenly united, and with a spirit that I have never seen
before.

I am old enough to remember well the days of our Civil War, when
regiments of volunteers, with flying flags and bands of music, marched
through our streets in Boston, on the way to the front. Crowds of
stay-at-homes, throngs of women and children lined the sidewalks,
shouting deliriously, and waving handkerchiefs, inspired by the marching
soldiers, with guns on their shoulders, and the strains of martial
music, varied with the then popular "The girl I left behind me," or,
"When this cruel war is over." But this is quite different. There are
no marching soldiers, no flying flags, no bands of music. It is the
rising up of a Nation as one man--all classes shoulder to shoulder, with
but one idea--"Lift up your hearts, and long live France." I rather pity
those who have not seen it.

Since the day when war was declared, and when the Chamber of
Deputies--all party feeling forgotten--stood on its feet and listened to
Paul Deschanel's terse, remarkabl