walls along the street’s over which hang dusty branches of trees or vines sneaking mischievously out of bounds.  A woe-begone trolley creaks through the narrow streets and heart-broken cabmen mourning over the mistakes of misspent lives, larrup disconsolate horses over stony streets as they creak and jog and wheeze ahead of the invisible crows that seem always to be hovering above ready to batten upon their rightful provender.  For an hour in the morning before our train left for Paris we chartered one of the ramshackle cabs of the town and took in Bordeaux.  It was vastly unlike either Emporia or Wichita, or anything in Kansas, or anything in America; or so far as that goes, to Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the wide and beautiful world.  “All this needs,” said Henry, as he lolled back upon the moth-eaten cushions of the hack that banged its iron rims on the cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it into our teeth, “all this needs is Mary Pickford and a player organ to be a good film!” The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the group of firemen in front of the engine house playing checkers or chess or something.  But the town had an historic interest for us as the home of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so we looked up their monument and did proper reverence to them.  They were moderate idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we thought them much like the Bull Moosers.  So we did what homage we could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror.  For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the knife had bitten many times.  So we stood before what seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered heads for a second before we took the train for Paris.

All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of France we were to see in our martial adventures.  It was fair and fat and smiling—­that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris, and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness.  The thing which we missed most from the landscape, being used to the American landscape, was the automobile.  We did not see one in the day’s journey.  In Kansas alone there are 190,000 continually pervading the landscape.  We had yet to learn that there are no private automobiles in France, that the government had commandeered all automobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons of gasoline a day allotted to each of them.  So we gazed at the two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbons of roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills, and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateaux that flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills.  War was a million miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming up from Bordeaux.