to the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.

As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now.  I thought of that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their burnt-out homes.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little.  The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of the river like so many ships, just as they stood in the twelfth century, and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window—­though it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent adventures when he feels the first chill of age—­is stamped with the characters of the fourteenth century.  And I think Jean de Venette would find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for like Jean he is a lover of the poor.  It was Monsignor Marbot who went in procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church.  And it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese like a beast of prey.  Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a maire, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See.  Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little house—­surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and his biretta.

We lay the night at an inn that must have been at one time a seigneurial mansion, for it had a noble courtyard.  I was shown to a room, and, having unpacked my valise, I turned on the taps, but no water issued; I applied a match to the gas-jet, but no flame appeared; I tried to open the window, but the sash stuck.  I rang the bell; that at least responded.  A maid appeared; I pointed to the taps and made demonstrations with the gas-jet.  To all of which she replied quite simply, “Ah! monsieur, c’est la guerre!” I had heard that answer before.  With such a plea of confession and avoidance had the boots at the Hotel de la Poste at Rouen excused a gross omission to call me in the morning, and thus also had the aged waiter at the Metropole disposed of a flagrant error in my bill.  But this time it was convincing enough; gas-workers and waterworks men and carpenters were all at the war, and in the town of Meaux water was carried in pitchers and light was purchased at the chandler’s.  In France you get used to these things and imitate with a good grace the calm stoicism of your Allies.  For, after all, the enemy was pretty near, and as I retired to my couch I could hear the thunder of their guns.