killed.

The street in front of the consulate is a mass of fallen stone, and the
morning I called on Mr. Bardel a shell had hit his neighbor's chestnut-
tree, filled his garden with chestnut burrs, and blown out the glass of
his windows. He was patching the holes with brown wrapping-paper,
but was chiefly concerned because in his own garden the dahlias
were broken. During the first part of the bombardment, when firing
became too hot for him, he had retreated with his family to the corner
of the street, where are the cellars of the Roderers, the champagne
people. There are worse places in which to hide in than a champagne
cellar.

Mr. Bardel has lived six years in Rheims and estimated the damage
done to property by shells at thirty millions of dollars, and said that
unless the seat of military operations was removed the champagne
crop for this year would be entirely wasted. It promised to be an
especially good year. The seasons were propitious, being dry when
sun was needed and wet when rain was needed, but unless the
grapes were gathered by the end of September the crops would be
lost.

Of interest to Broadway is the fact that in Rheims, or rather in her
cellars, are stored nearly fifty million bottles of champagne belonging
to six of the best-known houses. Should shells reach these bottles,
the high price of living in the lobster palaces will be proportionately
increased.

Except for Red Cross volunteers seeking among the ruins for
wounded, I found that part of the city that had suffered completely
deserted. Shells still were falling and houses as yet intact, and those
partly destroyed were empty. You saw pitiful attempts to save the
pieces. In places, as though evictions were going forward, chairs,
pictures, cooking-pans, bedding were piled in heaps. There was none
to guard them; certainly there was no one so unfeeling as to disturb
them.

I saw neither looting nor any effort to guard against it. In their
common danger and horror the citizens of Rheims of all classes
seemed drawn closely together. The manner of all was subdued and
gentle, like those who stand at an open grave.

The shells played the most inconceivable pranks. In some streets the
houses and shops along one side were entirely wiped out and on the
other untouched. In the Rue du Cardinal du Lorraine every house
was gone. Where they once stood were cellars filled with powdered
stone. Tall chimneys that one would have thought a strong wind
might d