“Well, what do you think of this big racket (ce grand fracas)?”

“I have not seen enough of it to say.”

“Well, I think you are going to get a taste of it to-night.  I heard our artillery men (nos artiflots) early this morning firing their long-range cannon, and every time they do that the Boches throw shells into Pont-a-Mousson.  I have been expecting an answer all day.  If they start in to-night, get up and come down cellar, son.  This house was struck by a shell two weeks ago.”

The shadowy, candlelit room and the dark city became at his words more mysterious and hostile.  The atmosphere seemed pervaded by some obscure, endless, dreadful threat.  It was getting toward ten o’clock.

“Is this the only room you have?  I have never been in this suite.”

“No, there is another room.  Would you like to see it?”

He followed me into a small chamber from which everything had been stripped except a bedside table, a chair, and a crayon portrait of a woman.  The picture, slightly tinted with flesh color, was that of a bourgeoise on the threshold of the fifties, and the still candle-flame brought out in distinct relief the heavy, obese countenance, the hair curled in artificial ringlets, and the gold crucifix which she wore on her large bosom.  The Burgundian’s attention centered on this picture, which he examined with the air of a connoisseur of female beauty.

“Lord, how ugly she is!” he exclaimed.  “She might well have stayed.  Such an old dragon would have no reason to fear the Boches.”  And he laughed heartily from his rich lips and pulled his mustache.

“Don’t forget to hurry to the cellar, son,” he called as he went away.

At his departure the lonely night closed in on me again.  Far, far away sounded the booming of cannon.

I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first shell awakened me.  Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the swift ebb of a heavy concussion.  A piece of glass, dislodged from a broken pane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor.  For a minute or two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several objects rolled down the roof and fell over the gutters into the street.  It sounded as if some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from the height of the clouds.  Another silence followed.  Suddenly it was broken by a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of this noise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint as the sound of ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible speed to a whistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume and a roaring, grinding burst.  The sound of a great shell is never a pure bang; one hears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and the tearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grinding hammer-blow of terrific violence.  On the heels of this second shell came voices in the dark street, and the rosy