pace to give even a list of her manifold oeuvres, but one
at least bids fair to be associated permanently with her name. What is
now known in the United States as the French Heroes' Fund was started
by Mlle. Thompson under the auspices of _La Vie Feminine_ to help the
reformes rebuild their lives. The greater number could not work at
their old avocations, being minus an arm or a leg. But they learned to
make toys and many useful articles, and worked at home; in good
weather, sitting before their doors in the quiet village street. A
vast number of these Mlle. Thompson and various members of her
Committee located, tabulated, encouraged; and, once a fortnight,
collected their work. This was either sold in Paris or sent to
America.

In New York Mrs. William Astor Chanler and Mr. John Moffat organized
the work under its present title and raised the money to buy
Lafayette's birthplace. They got it at a great bargain, $20,000; for a
large number of acres were included in the purchase. Another $20,000,
also raised by Mr. Moffatt, repaired and furnished the chateau, which
not only is to be a sort of French Mt. Vernon, with rooms dedicated to
relics of Lafayette and the present war, as well as a memorial room
for the American heroes who have fallen for France, but an orphanage
is to be built in the grounds, and the repairs as well as all the
other work is to be done by the blind and the mutilated, who will thus
not be objects of charity but made to feel themselves men once more
and able to support their families. The land will be rented to the
reformes, the mutiles and the blind.

Mlle. Thompson and Mrs. Chanler, with the help of a powerful
Committee, are pushing this work forward as rapidly as possible in the
circumstances and no doubt it will be one of the first war meccas of
the American tourists so long separated from their beloved Europe.

VIII

The most insistent memory of my life in Passy at the Hotel Feminine is
the Battle of the Somme. After it commenced in July I heard the great
guns day and night for a week. That deep, steady, portentous booming
had begun to exert a morbid fascination before the advance carried the
cannon out of my range, and I had an almost irresistible desire to
pack up and follow it. The ancestral response to the old god of war is
more persistent than any of us imagine, I fancy. I was close to the
lines some weeks later, when I went into the Zone des Armees, and it
is quite positive that no