The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one’s heart.  She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant’s cottage, which have been made just habitable for her.  A few touches of bright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, with furniture of the simplest—­amid these surroundings on the outskirts of the ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to run the menage, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plans of the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect of the department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions.  The church has been already restored and reopened.  The first mass within its thronged walls was—­so the spectators say—­a moving sight. “That sad word—­Joy”—­Landor’s pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressing the bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which has seen—­so short a time ago—­death and murder and outrage at their worst.  The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has taken various forms.  The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk’s formal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of the old communes of France.  And the village insists that she shall claim her rights!  When the time came for dividing the communal wood in the neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with them and show her how to obtain her share.  As to the affection and confidence with which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through the village, to judge of its reality.

But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who have done this sort of work in France.  Look, for instance, at the work of the Society of Friends in the department of the Marne,—­on that fragment of the battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. Francois.  “Go and ask,” wrote a French writer in 1915, “for the village of Huiron, or that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed with blood and powder—­Sermaize.  Inquire for the English Quakers.  Books, perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long black coats and long faces.  Where are they?  Here are only a band of workmen, smooth-faced—­not like our country folk.  They laugh and sing while they make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw.  They are building wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles.  Around them are poor people whose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead.  These are the women, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, who have lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look like Lazarus rising from the tomb.  But life is beginning to come back to their eyes and their lips.  The hands they stretch out to you tremble with joy.  To-night they will sleep in a house, in their house.  And inside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cook with....  As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing.”