ped.

Were we after all going to be turned back? I had the guilty knowledge
that there was no reason why we should not be. I tried to look
magnificently unconcerned as I leaned forward to smile at the soldier.
I might have spared myself the effort. He never even glanced inside
the car. The examination of the papers was the most cursory thing
imaginable--a mere formality. The chauffeur simply held his stamped
paper towards the guard. The guard merely glanced at it, lifted his
gun, motioned us to proceed--and we proceeded.

It may amuse you to know that we never even showed the paper
again. We did meet two gendarmes on bicycles, but they nodded and
passed us without stopping.

The air was soft, like an early autumn day, rather than December as
you know it. There was a haze in the air, but behind it the sun shone.
You know what that French haze is, and what it does to the world,
and how, through it, one gets the sort of landscape painters love.
With how many of our pilgrimages together it is associated! We have
looked through it at the walls of Provins, when the lindens were rosy
with the first rising of the sap; we have looked through it at the circular
panorama from the top of the ruined tower of Montlhery; we have
looked through it across Jean Jacques Rousseau's country, from the
lofty terrace of Montmorency, and from the platform in front of the
prison of Philippe Auguste's unhappy Danish wife, at Etampes,
across the valley of the Juine; and from how many other beautiful
spots, not to forget the view up the Seine from the terrace of the
Tuileries.

Sometime, I hope, we shall see these plains of the Marne together.
When we do, I trust it will be on just such another atmospheric day as
yesterday.

As our road wound up the hill over the big paving-stones
characteristic of the environs of all the old towns of France,
everything looked so peaceful, so pretty, so normal, that it was hard
to realize that we were moving towards the front, and were only about
three miles from the point where the German invasion was turned
back almost three months ago to a day, and it was the more difficult
to realize as we have not heard the cannon for days.

A little way out of Meaux, we took a road to the west for Chauconin,
the nearest place to us which was bombarded, and from a point in
the road I looked back across the valley of the Marne, and I saw a
very pretty white town, with red roofs, lying on the hillside. I asked the
chauf