ful works of
charity which had been called out of this war, and giving a new
meaning to their name of the Society of Friends. But though they
were handy in the use of the wood given them by the French
Government for this purpose, not all their industry nor all their
friendliness could bring back the beauty of these old-world villages of
Champagne, built centuries ago by men of art and craft, and chiselled
by Time itself, so that the stones told tales of history to the villagers.
It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church,
through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof
whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting
carcase. A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway
before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God
for the blessings of each day. His hands were clenched behind his
bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat
and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church
with immense sadness in his eyes.

There was an old chateau near Huiron in which a noble family of
France had lived through centuries of war and revolution. It had many
pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking
a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where
ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great
yesterday of history. When I passed it, after the Germans had gone
that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of
mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The
gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the
cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion.
A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the
chateau of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed,
murderously, by outrageous hands.

In one of these villages of Champagne--I think it was at Blesmes--I
saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of
the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow,
God knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this
place of desolation.

It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully,
falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin. While
the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected
the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet. The children of many
gener