The air raids are increasing in number and intensity; this week we had four nights in the cellar. There are not so many oddities about the proceedings now we have settled in to the game in dead earnest. When we get the warning we act with as little delay as possible, seek one nearest available shelter, where we sit down to endure the strain as best we can. There is precious little badinage now about the Zeppelin parties; we all feel that they have long passed the amusing stage. Can you read between the lines? I wonder have you grasped the fact that the strain is becoming almost more than we can bear? I have the dreadful feeling that perhaps I myself will not be able to hold out. You know I never could do without sleep; my too active brain has always demanded its full measure, and rebelled when cheated of it. A Zeppelin night means anything from seven or eight o’clock at night till four in the morning—the strain of tension and fear never relaxed for a moment. Always you are listening, listening—and the gunfire never ceases. It is punctuated by the noise of the explosions following the bomb dropping, which means, though it may be a good many miles from you, that somebody is being punished. We still speak about the Zeppelins, though they don’t come any more. Their successors, the Gothas, are not less terrible; in fact they seem to be more daring, more destructive, faster and less vulnerable. Also they are equipped with all kinds of new and terrible death-dealing weapons. A very strange one descended on our little town night before last. We heard a noise like a rushing mighty wind or an express train, going at lightning speed through the air. It was not the usual steady whir of the Gotha’s engine. The thing fell in a garden at the top of Queen’s Hill and then exploded, doing much damage to houses, though mercifully no one was killed. They say it was an aerial torpedo which travels through the air by its own momentum. If this is true, imagine what magnitude this form of attack might achieve and how much we may yet have to suffer! How often one is appalled by this dedication of human will and mind power to the devil’s service. Is there to be no limit set to it? Is it the beginning of the terrors which will make men call on the rocks to cover them? You have no idea, Cornelia, what a weak helpless thing humanity is until it is subjected to this sort of thing. It isn’t clean fighting; it makes brave men desperate. I think on the whole the women bear it better. They are more used to suffering and never forget to be protective. All sorts of moving things happen about the children. One poor woman stretched herself over her two children on the floor as the torpedo was coming, hoping to receive the brunt herself. None of them were hurt.