The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth-century vaulting, was crowded with beautiful things from the church at Thann. The carvings on the choir stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing to boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists that made them. One figure forming an arm-rest had a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and, furthermore, he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, for he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his person in the classic position of one so suffering. Another showed a man leaning over, with delicately modeled back, his head in his hands, but _his_ ache was very manifestly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys and parrots abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth century evidently being out on a loose snaffle. A celebrated row of musical angels were so delicately carved, with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, that they would be well placed in some vitrine rather than high on a choir stall in a dim Gothic church. The celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Théobald from the column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here for safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another thing generally beyond reach. As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church struck three. The great and disastrous Austrian war-act was finished. It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked silently over to the curé’s house I thought of the cruel, interminable lists of dead and wounded and missing in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 1915, when the Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the ridges of the Carpathians. The curé, however, young, with fine, Italian face-bones, and frayed and spotted cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled liqueurs which are the pride and playthings of these valleys, explaining to us with snapping eyes special variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a glass up against the light in his long, thin _primitif_ hands, he poured me slowly something wrested from the mountain-ash (I had thought I might as well have a completely new sensation), and I went about the rest of the afternoon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast. Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the Place du Chapitre, where I found another interior of the kind I am now familiar with—that of the high and comfortable Alsatian bourgeoisie. Madame Chagué, large, white-haired, energetic, intelligent, agreeable, received us flanked by an amiable married daughter and a thin, upstanding veteran, his ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It’s the picture of what the gorgeous young heroes of our great war will be one day, _sans_ eyes, _sans_ teeth, _sans_ hair, _sans_ everything, and _toutes les fins sont tristes_.