butter. She paused in her quick, bird-like movements--
for she was waitress, cook, cashier, manager and owner, all rolled into
one--and cocking a saucy, unkempt head at him asked that the question be
repeated. This time, in his efforts to be understood, he stretched his
words out so that unwittingly his voice took on rather a whining tone.

"Well, don't cry about it!" she snapped. "I'll see what I can do."

Returning from the battle front our itinerary included a long stretch of
the great road that runs between Paris and Brussels, a road much favored
formerly by auto tourists, but now used almost altogether for military
purposes. Considering that we traversed a corner of the stage of one of
the greatest battles thus far waged--Mons--and that this battle had
taken place but a few weeks before, there were remarkably few evidences
remaining of it.

With added force we remarked a condition that had given us material for
wonderment in our earlier journeyings. Though a retreating army and an
advancing army, both enormous in size, had lately poured through the
country, the houses, the farms and the towns were almost undamaged.

Certain contrasts which took on a heightened emphasis by reason of their
brutal abruptness, abounded all over Belgium. You passed at a step, as
it were, from a district of complete and irreparable destruction to one
wherein all things were orderly and ordered, and much as they should be
in peaceful times. Were it not for the stagnated towns and the
depression that berode the people, one would hardly know these areas had
lately been overrun by hostile soldiers and now groaned under enormous
tithes. In isolated instances the depression had begun to lift.
Certain breeds of the polyglot Flemish race have, it appears, an almost
unkillable resilience of temper; but in a town a mile away all those
whom we met would be like dead people who walked.

Also, there were many graves. If we passed a long ridged mound of clay
in a field, unmarked except by the piled-up clods, we knew that at this
spot many had fought and many had fallen; but if, as occurred
constantly, one separate mound or a little row of separate mounds was at
the roadside, that probably meant a small skirmish. Such a grave almost
always was marked by a little wooden cross, with a name penciled on it;
and often the comrades of the dead man had hung his cap on the upright
of the cross. If it were a French cap or a Belgian the weather wou