a schoolboy again and going forth to the Crystal
Palace with money in my pocket, an entire half-crown, to be dribbled
away in pennyworths of sherbet and visits to curious side-shows. That
party was an annual affair for us that came in June as a celebration
of the Queen's birthday. My visit to M. was in August, but the
weather was still full summer.

As a lecturing tour that expedition was a flat failure. M.'s cavalry,
officers and men, were frankly bored and I realised from the very
start that I was not going to justify whatever M. said to the general
about me.

In every other respect the holiday was a success. I enjoyed it
enormously and I gained some very interesting experience. I saw
French rural life, a glimpse of it. Cavalry cannot be concentrated in
large camps as infantry are. When they are not wanted for fighting
they are scattered in small parties over some country district where
they can get water and proper accommodation for their horses. The men
are billeted in farm-houses. The officers live in chateaux and mess
in the dining-halls of French country gentlemen if such accommodation
is available, or take over two or three houses in a village, sleep
where they can and mess in the best room which the interpreter and
the billeting officer can find.

M. slept in a farm-house and secured a room adjoining his for my use.
I slept on the softest and most billowy feather bed I have ever come
across, with another feather bed, also very soft and billowy, over me
by way of covering. My room had an earthen floor, a window which
would not open, a broken chair and no other furniture of any kind. I
do not think that our landlady, the wife of a farmer who was with the
colours, had removed her furniture from the room to keep it out of my
way. That almost bare room was just her idea of what a bedroom ought
to be. Her kitchen and such other rooms as I saw in her house were
equally bare.

Unlike the French women whom I met in towns, this farmer's wife was a
slattern. She cared neither about her own appearance nor the look of
her house. She did not wash her children. But she worked. The land
was well tilled and her cattle well tended. There was no sign of
neglect in the fields. Things might have been a little better,
perhaps, the place more efficiently worked, if her husband had been
at home, but there was not room for much improvement. Yet that woman
had no one to help her except a very old man, her father-in-law, I
think, w