ce, like a cloud in the sky. It was painted over to
baffle the way of hostile aircraft, but the paint was wearing off, and the
gold showed through again, glinting and flashing in the air-waves.

The Seine was like molten liquid and the bridges which span it a
dozen times or more between Notre Dame and the Pont de l'Aima
were as white as snow, and unsubstantial as though they bridged the
gulfs of dreams. Even the great blocks of stone and the balks of
timber which lie on the mud banks below the Quai d'Orsay--it is where
the bodies of suicides float up and bring new tenants to the Morgue--
were touched with the beauty of this lady day, and invited an artist's
brush.

The Eiffel Tower hung a cobweb in the sky. Its wires had been thrilling
to the secrets of war, and this signal station was barricaded so that no
citizens might go near, or pass the sentries pacing there with loaded
rifles. But now it was receiving other messages, not of war. The
wireless operator with the receiver at his ears must have heard those
whispers coming from the earth: "I am spring... The earth is waking...
I am coming with the beauty of life... I am gladness and youth..."

Perhaps even the sentry pacing up and down the wooden barricade
heard the approach of some unseen presence when he stood still
that morning and peered through the morning sunlight. "Halt! who
goes there?" "A friend." "Pass, friend, and give the countersign."

The countersign was "Spring," and where the spirit of it stepped,
golden crocuses had thrust up through the warming earth, not far
from where, a night or two before, fire-balls dropped from a hostile air-
craft.

Oh, strange and tragic spring, of this year 1915! Was it possible that,
while Nature was preparing her beauty for the earth, and was busy in
the ways of life, men should be heaping her fields with death, and
drenching this fair earth with blood?

One could not forget. Even in Paris away from the sound of the guns
which had roared in my ears a week before, and away from the moan
of the wounded which had made my ears ache worse than the noise
of battle, I could not forget the tragedy of all this death which was
being piled up under the blue sky, and on fields all astir with the life of
the year.

In the Tuileries gardens the buds were green. But there were black
figures below them. The women who sat there all the afternoon,
sewing, and knitting, or with idle hands in their laps, were clothed in
widows' black.