treets,
the restaurants, the tea-rooms are full of them, and so, they tell me,
are the theatres.

Do you know what struck me most forcibly? You'll never guess. It was
that men in long trousers look perfectly absurd. I am so used to
seeing the culotte and gaiters that the best-looking pantaloons I saw
on the boulevards looked ugly and ridiculous.

I left the officer billeted in my house to take care of it. The last I saw
of him he was sitting at the desk in the salon, his pipe in his mouth,
looking comfortable and cosy, and as if settled for life. I only stayed a
few days, and came home, on New Year's Eve, to find that he had
left the night before, having been suddenly transferred to the staff of
the commander of the first army, as officier de la liaison, and I had in
his place a young sous-officier of twenty-two, who proves to be a
cousin of the famous French spy, Captain Luxe, who made that
sensational escape, in 1910, from a supposed-to-be-impregnable
German military prison. I am sure you remember the incident, as the
American papers devoted columns to his unprecedented feat. The
hero of that sensational episode is still in the army. I wonder what the
Germans will do with him if they catch him again? They are hardly
likely to get him alive a second time.

I wonder if the German books on military tactics use that escape as a
model in their military schools? Do you know that in every French
military school the reconnaisance which Count Zeppelin made in
Alsace, in the days of 1870, when he was a cavalry officer, is given
as a model reconnaissance both for strategy and pluck? I did not,
until I was told. Oddly enough, not all that Zeppelin has done since to
offend French ideas of decency in war can dull the admiration felt by
every cavalry officer for his clever feat in 1870.

Last Thursday,--that was the 4th,--we had our second releve.

The night before they left some of the officers came to say au revoir,
and to tell me that the Aspirant, who had been with me in December,
would be quartered on me again--if I wanted him. Of course I did.

Then the senior lieutenant told me that the regiment had suffered
somewhat from a serious bombardment the days after Christmas,
that the Aspirant had not only shown wonderful courage, but had had
a narrow escape, and had been cite a l'ordre du jour, and was to
have his first decoration.

We all felt as proud of him as if he belonged to us. I was told that he
had been sent into