king over your letters written while we were tied up in London,
in August, 1914, and was amused to find that in one of them you had
written 'the annoying thing is, that, after this is over, Germany will
console herself with the reflection that it took the world to beat her.'"
It is coming truer than I believed in those days,--and then I went
back to dishwashing.

You never saw such a looking kitchen as I found. Leon, the officers'
cook--a pastry cook before he was a soldier--was a nice, kindly, hard-
working chap, but he lacked the quality dear to all good house-
keepers--he had never learned to clean up after himself as he went
along. He had used every cooking utensil in the house, and such a
pile of plates and glasses! It took Amelie and me until two o'clock to
clean up after him, and when it was done I felt that I never wanted to
see food again as long as I lived. Of course we did not mind, but
Amelie had to say, every now and then, "Vive l'armee!" just to keep
her spirits up. Anyway it was consoling to know that they have more
to eat than we do.

The American corps had to leave one of their boys behind in our
ambulance, very ill with neuritis--that is to say, painfully ill. As the
boys of the American corps are ranked by the French army as
officers this case is doubly interesting to the personnel of our
modest hospital. First he is an American--a tall young Southerner
from Tennessee. They never knew an American before. Second,
he is not only an honorary officer serving France, he is really a
lieutenant in the officers' reserve corps of his own State, and
our little ambulance has never sheltered an officer before.

The nurses and the sisters are falling over one another to take care
of him--at least, as I always find one or two of them sitting by his bed
whenever I go to see him, I imagine they are.

The amusing thing is that he says he can't understand or speak
French, and swears that the only words he knows are:

Oui, oui, oui,
Non, non, non,
Si, si, si,
Et voila,
Merci!

which he sings, in his musical southern voice, to the delight of his
admiring nurses. All the same, whenever it is necessary for an
interpreter to explain something important to him, I find that he has
usually got the hang of it already, so I've my doubts if he has as little
French as he pretends. One thing is sure his discharge will leave a
big void in the daily life of the ambulance.

This is growing into a long letter--in the quiet