gh, and certainly no one wishes to
consider anything more serious than the present crisis. So there are
no revues, operas, or comedies.

The thing you missed perhaps most were the children in the Avenue
des Champs Elysees. For generations over that part of the public
garden the children have held sway. They knew it belonged to them,
and into the gravel walks drove their tin spades with the same sense
of ownership as at Deauville they dig up the shore. Their straw hats
and bare legs, their Normandy nurses, with enormous head-dresses,
blue for a boy and pink for a girl, were, of the sights of Paris, one of
the most familiar. And when the children vanished they left a dreary
wilderness. You could look for a mile, from the Place de la Concorde
to the Arc de Triomphe, and not see a child. The stalls, where they
bought hoops and skipping-ropes, the flying wooden horses, Punch-
and-Judy shows, booths where with milk they refreshed themselves
and with bonbons made themselves ill, all were deserted and
boarded up.

The closing down of the majority of the shops and hotels was not due
to a desire on the part of those employed in them to avoid the
Germans, but to get at the Germans.

On shop after shop are signs reading: "The proprietor and staff are
with the colors," or "The personnel of this establishment is mobilized,"
or "Monsieur------informs his clients that he is with his regiment."

In the absence of men at the front, Frenchwomen, at all times
capable and excellent managers, have surpassed themselves. In my
hotel there were employed seven women and one man. In another
hotel I visited the entire staff was composed of women.

An American banker offered his twenty-two polo ponies to the
government. They were refused as not heavy enough. He did not
know that, and supposed he had lost them. Later he learned from the
wife of his trainer, a Frenchwoman, that those employed in his stables
at Versailles who had not gone to the front at the approach of the
Germans had fled, and that for three weeks his string of twenty-two
horses had been fed, groomed, and exercised by the trainer's wife
and her two little girls.

To an American it was very gratifying to hear the praise of the French
and English for the American ambulance at Neuilly. It is the outgrowth
of the American hospital, and at the start of this war was organized by
Mrs. Herrick, wife of our ambassador, and other ladies of the
American colony in Paris, and the America