else.  The boy flashed home to his mother proud as Punch!  And just as we were pulling out of the village the boy came running to us with another little blue box of matches.  We thought the boy had discovered that matches would bring a franc a box from Americans and was preparing to make his fortune.  So Henry took the box, and as the car was moving handed the boy another franc.  We noticed him waving his hands and shaking his head.  And when we were a mile out of the village Henry opened his second box and found his original franc in it.  The boy’s mother was ashamed that he should have taken any money for a box of matches, and had made him bring back the money with another box to show how much the French appreciate the Americans coming to France.  We met many instances like that.

Soon the road was cluttered up with American soldiers.  They were driving motors, whacking mules, stringing along the by-paths and sweating copiously under the autumn sun.  We wondered in passing what an American farmer boy and his self-respecting mule thought of the two-wheeled French carts they were using.  Then we turned the corner and came into a new view; we saw our first troop of American soldiers quartered in a French village.  They were busy building barracks.  We stopped and visited them, and they showed us their quarters:  In barns, in lofts of houses, in cellars, in vacant stores—­everywhere that human beings could slip in, the American soldiers had installed themselves.  The Y.M.C.A. hut was finished, and in it a score of boys were writing letters, playing rag-time on the pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking American women at the counter across one end of the room.  An Irish Catholic padre in a major’s uniform was in charge of the sports of the camp and he literally permeated the Y.M.C.A. hut.  He was the leader of the men.  The little village where this troop lived faded into the plain and we rode again for five miles or so, and then came to another and another and still another.  At that time thirteen villages in an arc of forty miles or so contained most of our American troops.  We stopped many times on our long day’s journey.  Once we stopped for mid-day dinner and there came to Henry and me our first estrangement.  It is curious, as the poet sings, “how light a thing may move dissension between hearts that love—­hearts that the world in vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied.”  Well—­the thing that came between us was cooking—­cooking that has parted more soul mates than any other one thing in the world!  For two weeks more or less we had been eating in the French mess, or eating at country hotels or country homes in France, eating good French country cooking, and it was excellent.  A mid-day meal typically was a melon, or a clear soup, or onion soup, brown and strong; a small bit of rare steak or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice with browned potatoes or carrots, a vegetable entree—­peas, spinach, served dry and minced, or string beans; then