The Earl of Rosebery, former Prime Minister of Britain, is Honorary President of the Fund, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh is its treasurer.  And as I write we have raised an amount well into six figures in pounds sterling.  One of the things that made me most willing to undertake my last tour of America was my feeling that I could secure the support and cooperation of the Scottish people in America for my fund better by personal appeals than in any other way.  At the end of every performance I gave during the tour, I told my audience what I was doing and the object of the fund, and, although I addressed myself chiefly to the Scots, there has been a most generous and touching response from Americans as well.

We distributed little plaid-bordered envelopes, in which folk were invited to send contributions to the bank in New York that was the American depository.  And after each performance Mrs. Lauder stood in the lobby and sold little envelopes full of stamps, “sticky backs,” as she called them, like the Red Cross seals that have been sold so long in America at Christmas time.  She sold them for a quarter, or for whatever they would bring, and all the money went to the fund.

I had a novel experience sometimes.  Often I would no sooner have explained what I was doing than I would feel myself the target of a sort of bombardment.  At first I thought Germans were shooting at me, but I soon learned that it was money that was being thrown!  And every day my dressing-table would be piled high with checks and money orders and paper money sent direct to me instead of to the bank.  But I had to ask the guid folk to cease firing—­the money was too apt to be lost!

Folk of all races gave liberally.  I was deeply touched at Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the stage hands gave me the money they had received for their work during my engagement.

CHAPTER XXVIII

I have stopped for a wee digression about my fund.  I saw many interesting things in France, and dreadful things.  And it was impressed upon me more and more that the Hun knows no mercy.  The wicked, wanton things he did in France, and that I saw!

There was Mont St. Quentin, one of the very strongest of the positions out of which the British turned him.  There was a chateau there, a bonnie place.  And hard by was a wee cemetery.  The Hun had smashed its pretty monuments, and he had reached into that sacred soil with his filthy claws, and dragged out the dead from their resting-place, and scattered their helpless bones about.

He ruined Peronne in wanton fury because it was passing from his grip.  He wrecked its old cathedral, once one of the loveliest sights in France.  He took away the old fleurs-de-lis from the great gates of Peronne.  He stole and carried away the statues that used to stand in the old square.  He left the great statue of St. Peter, still standing in the churchyard, but its thumb was broken off.  I found it, as I rummaged about idly in the debris at the statue’s foot.