Here on the borderland I find there is often an additional reason for pride, where Fate, which could so easily have willed it otherwise, sometimes has allowed the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did the brother whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or rather the end of it. Those first four days of August, 1914, he had gone about the mountain heights and passes with his field-glass continually at his eyes to see if help were not coming from the hills in the guise of the _pantalons rouges_. But on the fourth day he was obliged to accompany his regiment into Germany, where he stayed three months. On hearing of the battle of the Marne through a French prisoner, he cried, “_Nous avons eu là une belle victoire!_” (“We have had a great victory!”) and he was put under arrest. His one idea being to desert, he asked to go into the lines again, knowing there would be no opportunity, if he remained in prison, training recruits. His chance came when he was fighting against the English in the north. His chiefs being killed or wounded, he, as under-officer, found himself in command of a company of a hundred and fifty men. With him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fighting in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is perhaps much) is all I know of him or ever shall; if he were beloved of a woman or had loved many, I know not. He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the grave. All that surrounds me as I write was his. His the full bookshelves, with an elaborate set of a _Geschichte der Literatur_, and a _Welt-Geschichte_ in many volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the many old, little books of prayer in tooled and beveled bindings of a generation or two ago, and the piles of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Two eighteenth-century maps hang on the walls, one of “Alsatia,” with queer German names for familiar places, and another of “Gallia,” and there is an incomparable, white, porcelain stove which heats quickly and gives out its pleasant heat during long hours. On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the last _chanoinesse_ of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xavière de Ferrette. She is dressed in full canonicals, with a large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle; some high order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the broad ribbon worn across her breast, and in her hands is a richly embossed prayer-book. The long face with its immensely high forehead has a full-lipped, very human mouth, and in the right, upper corner is her sixteen-quartered coat of arms. The story of the Chapter would make good, though long, reading, for, like many other things in this part of the world, it begins with Charlemagne and ends with the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally proud, and certainly _il y en a pour tous les goûts_.