narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by walls
concealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is their
atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to believe
one's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little bourgeois
villas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's self just
beyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. Down such a street, in a
great garden, lay the institution to which our two Frenchmen were
assigned. We had a hard time finding it in the night and rain, but at
length, discovering the concierge's bell, we sent a vigorous peal
clanging through the darkness. Oiler lifted the canvas flap of the
ambulance to see about our patients.

"All right in there, boys?"

"Yes," answered a voice.

"Not cold?"

"Non. Are we at the hospital?"

"Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge."

There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman opened the
door. She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin, black hair was
neatly parted in the middle, and her face was shrewd, but not unkindly.

"Deux blesses (two wounded), madame," said I.

The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off bell
tinkled.

"Come in," she said. "The porter will be here immediately."

We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and a
carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.

"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked.

"I cannot say."

A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small,
beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots,
and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.

"Two wounded have arrived," said the lady. "You are to help these
messieurs get out the stretchers."

The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance,
glowing red behind its curtain of rain.

"Mon Dieu, what a deluge!" he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With an
"Easy there," and "Lift now," we soon had both of our clients out of the
ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little
room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy,
stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small,
nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. The
mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside the
Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-aged
servant--a big-boned, docile-l