advertisers, most of the daily papers have now dwindled to
microscopic proportions. The virile intelligence of Paris journalism and
the nimble and adventurous inquisitiveness, which are its normally
distinguishing characteristics, have gone, like everything else, to the
front. As the editor of the Gil Blas says in a farewell poster to his
subscribers: "Youth has only one duty to perform in these days. Our
chief and all the staff have joined the colors. Whenever events shall
permit, Gil Blas will resume its cheerful way. A bien-tot."

*France and England As Seen in War Time*

*An Interview With F. Hopkinson Smith.*

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE, Dec. 6, 1914.]

F. Hopkinson Smith was in France when the war broke out, he spent
September in London, and is now back in New York. He has brought home
many sketches. Not sketches which suggest war in the least, but which
were made with the thought of the war lurking in the background.

"Curiously enough," he said, without waiting for any opening question
from THE TIMES reporter--Mr. Smith often interviews himself--"curiously
enough, I was on my way to Rheims to make a sketch of the Cathedral when
the war broke out. I had started out to make a series of sketches of the
great European cathedrals. Not etchings, but charcoal sketches.

"Let me say here, too, that cathedrals for the most part ought not to be
etched. You lose too many shadows, though you gain in line; but in the
etching you have to cross-hatch so heavily with ink that the result is
just ink, and not shadow at all. Charcoal gives you depth and
transparency. I was eager to do a series of the cathedrals, as I had
done a series for the Dickens and Thackeray books, and had planned to
give my, entire Summer to it.

"I had been in London for some time. I had sketched in Westminster, in
St. Bartholomew's. Everything peaceful and quiet. It seems now as if we
ought to have felt--all of us, the people on the streets, I,
shopkeepers, every one--the approach of this tremendous war. But we
didn't, of course. No one in England had the faintest suspicion that
this terrible inhuman thing was going to happen.

"I went on to France. I sketched Notre Dame, over which they exploded
shells a month or so later. I did some work in the beautiful St.
Etienne. I sauntered down into South Normandy and was stopping for a
little color work at the Inn of William the Conqueror before going on to
Rheims."

These water c