It was late when two officers accompanied me to my dwelling, to the sucking sound of boots in mud, and under a starless sky hanging dark and heavy over a black, black earth. At last I could draw literally the drapery of my couch about me and lie down to dreams of _my_ men in blood and glory before Sedan. XI THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE _November 8th, St.-Amarin, Night._—Fancy and feeling too quickened for sleep. If there is anything I did not see or anything I did not feel, in and about St.-Amarin, I challenge some one of the Mission to produce it. This was my day, or rather half of it. At 8.45 Lieutenant Fress, Inspector of Schools, came to fetch me, and not knowing how to be late (alack!), I am on the stairs as he rings the bell. We pass out into a white, rather flat November world toward the schoolhouses, everywhere the clean odor of freshly hewn wood and sawdust hanging on the November air. Now the re-Gallicizing of Alsace is one of the most interesting political operations I have ever seen, and Heaven knows I’ve seen many in many lands. But this washing out and marking in of history on the clean slate of childhood is different from anything else, though easier than most things, the eye of youth glancing easily from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth—and soft and eager the slate of its mind. The St.-Amarin schoolhouse is a large, solid building, its walls hung everywhere with huge war-posters, all of those one sees in Paris and many besides. The classes for the smaller children, in accordance with the traditions of the valley, here also are in the hands of the Sisters of “The Divine Providence,” who, in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, opened in St.-Amarin the first school for girls. The other classes are taught by carefully selected Alsatian teachers or by mobilized French schoolmasters. Formerly French was the language of honor, for the well-to-do only, but now this article, once “of luxury,” is for all the language of their country and their heart, and pride mixes with the zeal with which the peasants pursue _la belle langue_—not always successfully. For in these border regions the tongue has an un-Gallic thickness; the voice is placed far back in the throat, with a strong accent on the tonic, nothing of the light flinging from the lips that makes the beauty of the French language and its conquest so difficult. We begin with a class of small children, where a smiling, almost exuberantly happy nun is teaching a group of little delivered darlings to sing, “_il y avait une bergère et ron, ron, ron, petit pat à pon_”—to my surprise, in the latest manner of Jacques Dalcroze. They evidently mean to keep abreast of the times here in Alsace.