is beautiful music, carefully done, artistically executed, but the orchestras are made up for the most part of men past the military age.  We heard “La Tosca” one afternoon and in the orchestra sat twenty men with grey hair and the tenor was fat!  As the season grew old, we heard “Louise,” “Carmen,” “Aphrodite,” “Butterfly” (in London), and “Aida” (in Milan), and always the musical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies who are no better than they should be, was music from old heads and old hearts.  The “other lips and other hearts whose tales of love” should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet are toying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the dance of death.  That is the music the young men are playing in Europe today.  But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the music that should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reeds and strings and brass is an echo, an echo altogether lovely but passionless!

Finally our season of waiting ended.  We came home to the Ritz at midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had been notified that we were to start for the front the next morning.  We told him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessed to him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned.  He had been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Cross commissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seen the worst and that this was just another cross.  But when we reached our rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his voice, not in pleading, but in command.  For we were to start at seven the next morning, and it was orders.  So each went to his bedroom and began unwrapping his bundles.  In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate divinity!  With me there was trouble.  Someone had blundered.  The shirt went on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers—­someone had shuffled those trousers on me.  Even a shoe spoon and foots-case wouldn’t get them to rise to their necessary height.  Inspection proved that they were 36; now 36 doesn’t do me much good as a waist line!  There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe.  Yet there we were.  It was half past twelve.  In six hours more we must be on our way to the front—­to the great adventure.  Uniforms were imperative.  And there was the hiatus!  Whereupon Henry rose.  He rang for the valet; no response.  He rang for the tailor; he was in bed.  He rang for the waiter; he was off duty.  There was just one name left on the call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang for the chambermaid!  And she appeared as innocent of English as we were of French.  It was an awful moment!  But Henry slowly began making gestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones.  The gestures were the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republican party at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912—­beautiful gestures and impressive.  The maid became interested.