to
find her there. Since I landed, I haven't seen her. But I met Captain
Hewes in Paris, and he was looking for her.

"I had never known how fine she was until those days on the boat. It
was wonderful on the nights when everything was darkened and we were
feeling our way through the danger zone, to have her sing for us. I
believe we should all have gone to the bottom singing with her if a
submarine had sunk us.

"I am finding myself busier than I have ever been before, finding
myself, indeed, facing the most stupendous thing in the world. It
isn't the wounded men or the dead men or the heart-breaking aspect of
the refugees that gets me, it is the sight of the devastated
country--made barren and blackened into hell not by devils, but by
those who have called themselves men. When I think of our own country,
ready soon to bud and bloom with the spring, and of this country where
spring will come and go, oh, many springs, before there will be bud and
bloom, I am overwhelmed by the tragic contrast. How can we laugh over
there when they are crying here? Perhaps more than anything else, the
difference in conditions was brought home to me as I motored the other
day through a country where there was absolutely no sign of life, not a
tree or a bird--except those war birds, the aeroplanes, hovering above
the horizon.

"Well, as we stopped our car for some slight repairs, there rose up
from a deserted trench, a lean cat with a kitten in her mouth. Oh,
such a starved old cat, Jean, gray and war-worn. And her kitten was
little and blind, and when she had laid it at our feet, she went back
and got another. Then she stood over them, mewing, her eyes big and
hungry. But she was not afraid of us, or if she was afraid, she stood
her ground, asking help for those helpless babies.

"Jean, I thought of Polly Ann. Of all the petted Polly Anns in
America, and then of this starved old thing, and they seemed so
typical. You are playing the glad game over there, and it is easy to
play it with enough to eat and plenty to wear, and away from the horror
of it all. But how could that old pussy-cat be glad, how could she be
anything but frightened and hungry and begging my help?

"Well, we took her in. We had some food with us, and we gave her all
she could eat, and then she curled up on a pile of bags in the bottom
of the car, and lay there with her kittens, as happy as if we were not
going lickety-split over the shell-torn space